We’ve blogged briefly about how vast areas of the Sahel, far from degenerating, are actually experiencing something of an agricultural rebirth, thanks in some small measure to tree-planting. ((Skeptics may point to rainfall cycles; I’m not sure it matters.)) A post from Oxfam America summarizes some of those efforts, and explains that Oxfam brought some of the people responsible — elevated to eco-hero status — to Washington DC “for discussions with US legislators about local solutions to food insecurity and climate change.” We haven’t noticed any reports of those discussions, but are happy to draw attention to the high impact of local solutions to local problems, especially when they make use of agricultural biodiversity. Thanks to CAS-IP, which has an expanded gloss on Oxfam’s efforts.
Nibbles: Climate change, Papaya sex, Inheritance, AGCommons
- “New study warns that climate change could create agricultural winners and losers in east Africa.” Any other possibilities?
- “Researchers to perform sex change operation on papaya.” Bang goes a bunch of sexual diversity.
- Inherited wealth is good for farmers, better for herders, lousy for hunters.
- AGCommons is a CGIAR project to deliver information to farmers in Africa. Watch their new video, with added Andy Jarvis goodness.
Round and round the money goes
There’s something very weird about this story, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. According to a press release from the University of Texas at Austin, researchers there have just been given USD 4.6 million “to study impact of climate change on potential biofuel source”. The potential biofuel source is switchgrass, which may, one-day, provide useful amounts of ethanol. But hang on. The reason switchgrass is suddenly interesting is that is could substitute for petroleum. And that’s a good idea because it might slow the emission of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide. So they’re going to study how climate change affects switchgrass, which may alter climate change, which may change the use of switchgrass?
My head’s reeling. Someone help me.
Actually, it’s not really about the impact of climate change. That’s a big part of the headline and a small part of the study, which is more about how different switchgrass varieties perform under different conditions, especially on the more marginal land that is most likely to be used for growing biofuels. The researchers will also be asking how the different varieties respond to the different growing conditions that are predicted under different climate change scenarios.
Oh no, the spinning sensation, it’s starting again.
Geo mashup artist needed
Luigi mentioned the UK Science’s Museum’s interactive map on climate change and crops. Elsewhere, ((Yes, there is life outside agro.agro.biodiver.se.)) he draws attention to maps of diabetes around the world. Now I find a map of “small farms” in the US.
What I want, obviously, is a graphic that will show me any relationships between the prevalence of small farms and diabetes, over time, corrected for access to the internet, obviously, and for the whole world. Not a lot to ask, is it? Oh, and I can’t find diabetes at Gapminder World.
How to breed for the future
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…
…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.
What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.