Author: Robert Hijmans

Posted on

Discourse for dinner

This is not just any blog. It is a local blog. Or at least you could pretend I live in your street, and shop in your mall. Does that makes this post more palatable?

It seems to work that way with food. At least where I come from, a dish that is “from our own garden” is supposed to be of high quality, not a sign of poverty. Chad Nilep, in an elegant post on the Linguistic Anthropology blog reflects on the Japanese preference for “naichimai”, Japanese grown rice ((Ed.: Coincidentally, there’s more on Japanese crops over at Vaviblog today.)):

Thus (I thought to myself this afternoon), while consuming naichimai, Japanese consumers enjoy not only the material element of the rice itself, but also the melancholic discourses of national nostalgia, imagined though they may be.

But you could also imagine that I live in a far and exotic place where we produce and eat food that you can only envy. Europe is full of that tradition: ham and cheese from Parma, bubbly wine from Champagne. You name it.

Ask for the main discourse the next time you are eating out.

Posted on

Crop maps of Russia and its neighbors

I have often looked for detailed crop distribution maps for the countries of the former Soviet Union and found these hard to come by. Not any more! There is a fabulous on-line atlas of agriculture in Russia and neighboring countries.

It has descriptions and maps for a 100 crops, including potato and wheat of course, but also lesser known niceties as the Snowball Tree, Sea Bucktorn and Winter Squash. The maps are pretty, here is an example for Siberian Wild Rye (you know, Siberian Black-eyed Susan; Clinelymus sibiricus (L.) Nevski). Better still, they will be available for dowload in GIS format next year.

Distribution of Siberian wild rye

There are also entries for 540 wild crop relatives and other agriculturally relevant plants, and for pests, diseases and weeds.

Awesome.

Posted on

Pollan for president

In an open letter in the New York Times magazine, slow food pundit Michael Pollan urges the next US president, the Farmer in Chief, to

Reform the entire food system: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on.

His main point is that the US should wean from oil, and resolarize the farm. I can see where he is coming from, but does he really want all that backbreaking drudgery again? Yikes.

Pollan also says that the government should encourage farmers to

grow as many different crops and animals as possible. Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

Fair enough, but at what cost? Pollan says that we do not know, because we haven’t tried. Well, I would agree that organic agriculture can be very productive, but kicking out fertilizers all together is a foolish idea.

It is a long article, and it has a long list of policy objectives: “Perennialize” commodity agriculture; Enhance national security by decentralization of the food system; Four-Season Farmers’ Markets; And, create a Federal Definition of “Food.” (I believe the goal is to make it illegal to call junk, food).

Pollan is a bit too much of a romantic to my taste. But then I am not much of a visionary. The US certainly should change some of its bad food habits. Our times call for a presidents who withstands the Agro-Industrial Complex (and who does not fear Iowa’s voters). If anything, Mr. President should take Pollan’s most daring advice: rip a section of the White House lawn, and farm and govern by example.

Posted on

More bad news: the eco-crunch

The other day, Luigi suggested investing in watermelons now that the credit crunch has made banks go bust and stocks worthless. Hold on. Maybe the watermelons will also go belly up, as the BBC reports that we are also heading for an eco-crunch. This unwelcome news is based on The Living Planet Report, produced by the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network. “The global footprint exceeded the earth’s biocapacity by 25% in 2003, which meant that the Earth could no longer keep up with the demands being placed upon it.”

I am torn. Yes, we are depleting our resources. Yes, it is scary. But this is also déjà vu all over again. The predictions made in Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, and many other gloomy predictions from the 1960-70s, have turned out to be incorrect. Human creativity has outsmarted perceived physical limits; but there are real physical limits too…. Have we really reached them?

In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Not a strange prediction given the famines that occurred in the years before the book was written. But it never happened; we got the Green Revolution instead.

Food shortages, or at least high food prices, were all of a sudden back on the front pages this year. Is the end near then? Not yet. Now that speculators are retreating, and farmers have responded to higher prices by producing more (25% more wheat produced in Europe! Perhaps largely because the ‘set-aside’ subsidized fallowing policy expired?). Food prices are tumbling again. For how long?

Posted on

Maize and genetic engineering: why bother?

I was talking to Greg Edmeades tonight. Our conversation coalesced on the topics of the recent posts on maize water stress tolerance and on the usefulness of engineering purple tomatoes.

For many years, Greg led the maize crop physiology group at CIMMYT. He says that one of the main reasons for their success with drought tolerance is their long term institutional commitment to it: 35 years and counting. A particularly impressive feat is the widespread adoption of their maize varieties in southern Africa. For example, ZM623, selected from South African parents by Marianna Bänziger, is grown on about a million ha, says Edmeades.

His take on biotech for drought tolerance is, sure, “use whatever works, but if you are an African agricultural research institute, then, why bother?” Monsanto is reporting 10-15% yield increase under drought stress, and says it will make their technology freely available for use in Africa. Edmeades reckons that you can get a similar yield increase in about 7 years of conventional breeding and selection. And less when using molecular markers. If that is the case, it may not be worth it to deal with the complexities of genetic engineering.

Unless, perhaps, the approaches are entirely additive and you get a combined yield benefit of 30%. I think that’s unlikely. Drought tolerance is about making best use of the available water. It does not increase the amount of water.

Later:
Greg told me that I had been a little harsh in suggesting that he would not advise national programs in Africa to use a transgenic approach to drought tolerance. He would only advice against transgenes if “they had access to a steady stream of good germplasm improved for drought tolerance, and there was no regulatory framework for transgenes in place in that country. If regulatory frameworks exist, and there is no facility of improving their own varieties (or newly released commercial varieties) for drought tolerance in a systematic way, then certainly I’d take the transgenic option, especially since it is being offered on a royalty free basis.”