Category: Climate change

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Building on coconut

The World Bank’s Development Marketplace 2009 is continuing to feature stories from the winners on its web site. And that’s good because we can scan them as they come up and draw attention to those that involve agricultural biodiversity. Today’s pick, a project from Samoa to build traditional houses “as models of ‘safer, accessible, resilient, and sustainable housing'”.

What’s particularly nice about this is the idea that traditional Samoan houses depend absolutely on agricultural products like the coconut fibre rope that people use to lash the components together. Modern houses built from steel reinforced concrete and corrugated metal cannot withstand cyclones, and their materials become deadly flying objects during storms. Hence the “innovation” of rediscovering traditional methods and material. Might help conserve coconut diversity too, I suppose.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about more obvious, though no less traditional, things to do with coconuts, why not download Coconut Recipes, from Bioversity International and COGENT?

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“It is silly to think of one solution”

Johan Schut pulled a folding knife from his hip pocket, inserted the tip into the base of a bright, crispy head of romaine lettuce and severed it in two.

“See there, the little brown specks with black legs?” He lifted one of the busy beasts onto the tip of his blade. “It’s a family of aphids. This is a non-resistant lettuce.”

Gotta love the New York Times ledes (as we ex-reptiles call them). This one certainly got me reading, and probably would have done even if I weren’t interested in “entrepreneurs and scientists [who] are trying to use all available techniques, including genetic modification, to improve agriculture around the world.”

It’s all there; cisgenesis, AFLP and MAS, arms races, private-public partnerships, options up the wazoo. Go Wageningen!

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Nibbles: Climate, Money, Wine, Rice, Photosynthesis, Diversity

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Agrobiodiversity features in 2009 Development Marketplace awards

Our friend Ehsan Dulloo of Bioversity International is the frontman for a project that has just been selected as one of the winners of this year’s Development Marketplace awards.

A DM grant will enable Biodiversity International to protect the livelihoods of some 200 vulnerable women farmers, by providing access to seeds for locally-adapted varieties of crops. The project draws from gene banks, indigenous knowledge and farmer know-how, as well as traditional ways of adapting to climate variability.

There are several other agrobiodiversity projects among the winners. For example, “Peru’s Associación ANDES will support plant-breeding to increase diversity and production of nutritious potatoes and other tubers, improving health, incomes and quality of life for the community’s people.” And in the Philippines the “Trowel Development Foundation will replant mangroves and set up a value-chain system to fatten and market tie-crabs.” Well worth exploring the whole list. Congratulations to all.