We’ve nibbled the new New Agriculturist but not highlighted specifically, I think, the fact that it has a special on bananas. And African bananas in particular. Coincidentally, there’s a paper out in Food Chemistry on genetic variability in carotenoid content within Musa .
Nibbles: Journal, Biofuel source, Old seeds, Bees, Aquaculture, Millennium Seed Bank, Pests, Earthworms, Jellyfish, Cuba, Japan, Kerala, Queensland, Goats, Cacao, Savanna, Global maps, Nepal
- New Gene Conservation is out. Put out more flags.
- Biofuel from coffee grounds? Right. Hope the stuff was shade-grown, anyway.
- Is a lupin or date palm seed the oldest ever found? Let the controversy rage.
- Bees scare caterpillars as well as pollinating plants. Thankfully, Europe is on the job, colony-collapse-wise.
- Trouble for Scottish farmed salmon. And the wild ones may have their problems too. But aquaculture in general is booming, they say.
- Google Earth discovers forest. Not agrobiodiversity, but fun nonetheless.
- “It doesn’t just take in seeds – it sends them out.”
- Maize pest will love climate change. Well, some of them anyway.
- The latest review of earthworms discussed.
- Jellyfish and chips?
- Eating local pretty much unavoidable in Cuba. Yes, everyone wants to be a locavore these days.
- Japanese amateur botanists get into genebanking.
- “108 dishes based on jackfruit and seed varieties that are facing extinction were also exhibited at the festival.” 108?
- Queensland markets its tropical produce via a new website. No reason why others shouldn’t do the same, is there?
- “People shouldn’t underestimate how important a goat can be for a family in Africa.” Having had to assist in slaughtering one over Christmas, I certainly don’t.
- A rapid run-through the history of chocolate.
- Long-fallow agriculture in Mali leads to more, more diverse and taller trees.
- Global accessibility map published. Also one of fires, and intact forests. Let a thousand agrobiodiversity mash-ups bloom. Thanks, Andy.
- Nepal has lots of medicinal plants. Funny they don’t seem to feature in the Western Terai Landscape Complex Project.
Nibbles: Coffee
- Get your eco-coffee here. Where? Dominican Republic!
Nibbles: Early diet, Rice, Veggies, Barley, Research, Taiwan, Coffee trade
- Early Peruvians didn’t brush their teeth. On the plus side, they had a tasty, varied diet.
- Mangrove rice farming in West Africa: The Book.
- “Could it be that vegetables are the new meat?“
- Wild relative rescues barleys threatened by Russian pests.
- Gates supports McKnight supports poor farmers.
- Vavilov does Formosa.
- Ethiopian Commodity Exchange gets to grips with coffee. Starbucks unavailable for comment.
Over-utilized crops?
Thinking about biofortification, I imagined a world that relies on fewer and fewer over-utilized crops. When will 95% of our food come from two or three of them? Perhaps a maize-arabidobsis hybrid, a cassava wunderroot, and super-rice? Shouldn’t we rather buck that trend and diversify agriculture? That message comes from several corners, like this one: “a food system that is good for us, our communities and the planet is small-scale, diversified agriculture.”
I checked 1 the FAO statistics to see how bad things are going. How quickly are we un-diversifying agriculture? If you consider the fraction of crop land planted to different crops, it appears that — at the global scale — the opposite of what I expected is happening. Between 1961 and 2007, maize and soybean area went up, but that was countered by the decline in the area planted with wheat and barley. 2 It is a story of both winners and losers, and — overall — an increase in diversity.
Global crop diversity, expressed as the relative amount of land planted to different crops, did not change much between 1961 and 1980, but is has increased since. Between 1980 and 2007, the Shannon index of diversity went up from 3.14 to 3.34.
Do tell me why I am wrong. Is it a matter of scale? Global level diversification of crops while these crops are increasingly geographically concentrated? Could be. Is the diversity index too sensitive to the relative decline in wheat? Perhaps. Or are we really in a phase of (re-) diversification, at least in terms of the relative amount of land planted to different crop species? 3 I cannot dismiss that possibility. For example, I have heard several people speak about on-going diversification (away from rice) in India and China. Has anyone looked at this, and related global consumption patterns, in detail?