- ILEIA celebrated 25 years with a conference yesterday. Reports to appear on the blog. h/t Danny
- Summary of the big ag bash in Copenhagen.
- US fruits and vegetables most at risk from climate change, says USDA.
- Wine and corn (maize) too!
- Perhaps they could learn from Indian farmers?
- Cocoa price highest for 32 years. Good news for cocoa farmers? I doubt it.
Nibbles: CWR protected, Aquaculture, Super potato, Maize domestication, Climate in Africa, Zimbabwe, Pepper, Chinese genebank
- Indian tiger park protects crop wild relatives and other useful plants. h/t Danny.
- CAPRi News highlights a book about Asian Aquaculture Successes.
- Precision breeding creates super potato. Yeah, if you want an industrial feedstock, not food.
- Maize moved from hand to hand, not with moving farmers. And that means … ?
- An African view of climate change. Complex.
- Zimbabwe’s advice on climate change: “Plant more sorghum, less maize“. Simple.
- Survival farming in Zimbabwe. Hard.
- Small farmers growing Piper pepper in Vietnam
- China has set up its first national seed bank as part of the country’s efforts to protect biodiversity. I’ve been there, says Jeremy, and it is stunning.
Law of unintended consequences, coconut edition
The late, great Garrett Hardin wanted society to move beyond literacy and numeracy to ecolacy, an ability to think ecologically. And he exemplified this with various stories that hinged on the consequences of small changes. Hardin’s key question: “And then what?” I think he’d have liked this one, which I heard on National Public Radio.
The government of Kiribati, a small island state in the Pacific, was concerned about overfishing. So it decided to subsidize the coconut oil industry, because if people earned more from coconut, they would fish less. Unfortunately, as the bumper sticker would have it, A bad day fishing is better than a good day working. In Kiribati, as elsewhere. After the coconut subsidies were introduced fishing increased by a third and the reef fish population dropped by almost a fifth.
Sheila Walsh, a graduate student at the Scrippps Institute of Oceanography, went out to Kiribati and discovered that “people earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing”.
Turns out that this is something that happens often in programmes to help fish stocks by persuading fisherfolk to do other things. People who fish like to fish, and that’s what they do. They like to be out on the water, according to lots of studies. Recognizing that, one potential solution incorporates ecolacy:
Walsh says she’s trying to help the government figure out how to fix the problem of overfishing, which they’d accidentally made worse. Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.
Without their tackle on board, presumably.
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?
Which came first, beer or bread?
Rachel Laudan tackles the perennial question that keeps food and agriculture nerds awake long into the night … by saying it’s a bad question and asking some better ones.
What problems did grains solve, what tools did humans have? Well, the problem they solved was one of fuel. Humans need fuel. Grains, if you can process them for fewer calories than you get out at the end, are great sources of fuel. Maybe you can even increase the calories by processing.
Blast! That’s another blog I’m going to have to subscribe to. h/t The Scientist Gardener.