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?
The article goes on to describe how the master brewer eventually found 14 grams of Wataribune rice in the genebank at the National Agricultural Institute in Tsukuba, and parlayed that into a range of award-winning sakes. The photo, by article author Melinda Joe, shows how easily Wataribune rice grains fall from the ears of the stalk, making it a challenging rice strain to work with. There’s a lot more in the article, about rice varieties in sake and about ordinary Japanese people who are spearheading a movement towards more regional diversity in rice, including groups that reclaim and regenerate abandoned rice paddies.