You know, these Nibbles (the short, soundbite-type things which appear at the top of the right sidebar of this page) are fun to do, but sometimes you end up downplaying, or over-simplifying, an important, interesting — and interestingly complex — story. Take what I said about the American chestnut a few days ago. The recent history of Castanea dentata is proud and tragic ((Looking further back, it also played an important role in native America agroforestry.)), and efforts to bring it back from the brink of annihilation well-nigh heroic. To imply, as I did, that these efforts were confined to hybridizing the American with the Chinese chestnut was justified only by the necessity for extreme brevity. In fact, of course, it is not just hybridization but repeated back-crossing. And not just interspecific crossing but also painstaking crossing among the few remaining pure American chestnuts, as reported in the article that prompted me to revisit the original story and hopefully make amends for my earlier flippancy.
Restoring the American chestnut
A grant allows American chestnuts to survive, as hybrids with the Chinese species.
Seed Regulation: How much is enough?
Earlier this year we posted about how EU Regulations destroy agricultural biodiversity and proposed rules to allow the marketing of European traditional varieties. Eliseu Bettencourt, a colleague with a close interest, said then that he didn’t have enough time to intervene in the discussion. Now, he says, he has a chance. Which would be kind of dull except that he’s seen the very latest drafts of the documents …
The post of 19th February 2007 refers to the “Draft Commission Directive establishing the specific conditions under which seed and propagating material of agricultural and vegetable species may be marketed in relation to the conservation in situ and the sustainable use of plant genetic resources through growing and marketing”, supposedly due to come into force on 1st April 2007. The Directive did indeed materialize as the writer of the post so rightly guessed then, though he even refrained from the obvious joke.
I guess the writer was referring to the draft document of May 2006, which bore that title. According to the drafts I have had access to later, in February 2007, that document was sub-divided intro three different documents, respectively: Continue reading “Seed Regulation: How much is enough?”
Surveying diversity
The kind of survey where a researcher turns up at farmers’ houses and starts asking a lot of standard, rigid questions about the problems they have been having with their crops and livestock has been somewhat unfashionable of late. In fact, one of the reasons for the explosion of rapid rural appraisal (RRA) methodologies in the 1980s, followed by more participatory, often qualitative, methods (PRA) in the 1990s, was so-called “survey slavery: questionnaires surveys which took too long, misled, were wasteful, and were reported on, if at all, late.” ((See this note prepared for participants in a workshop on PRA.))
A way — in fact, a whole menu of ways — was found, as a result of the pioneering work of some NGOs and universities, of allowing people, even marginalized groups, to set the very agenda of research, as opposed to just answering a bunch of questions that researchers thought interesting.
But there is a place for well-designed, carefully tested and sensitively-administered surveys to document and analyze the ways farmers manage their resources — including their agrobiodiversity — and to provide a baseline against which to gauge the effectiveness of interventions or other possible changes. I want to talk about two recent papers that use farmer surveys to characterize farming systems, as examples of the kind of thing there might be more of in agricultural biodiversity work.
The first paper, on surveys of smallholder families in northern Pakistan, focuses on livestock production. ((Abdur Rahman, Alan J. Duncan, David W. Miller, Juergen Clemens, Pilar Frutos, Iain J. Gordon, Atiq-ur Rehman, Ataullah Baig, Farman Ali and Iain A. Wright. Livestock feed resources, production and management in the agro-pastoral system of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan region of Pakistan: The effect of accessibility. Agricultural Systems, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 5 July 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2007.05.003)) The surveys were done along two transects which contrasted markedly in their transport infrastructure. One of the things the researchers looked at was the percentage of cross-bred animals per household. They found that there was a higher proportion of such improved animals in the transect with well-developed transport links and more accessible markets than in the more isolated area. As the roads get better in this latter area, the researchers think that “the proportion of traditional, unimproved animals … is likely to diminish,” and there are also likely to be “changes in land use towards higher-value commodities such as potatoes.” An interesting conclusion about likely genetic erosion — in both crops and livestock — in the region. One could imagine using this kind of information to identify areas throughout the country which are at high risk of genetic erosion due to impending road building or improvement.
The second paper looked at the adoption of soil conservation practices in Kajado district, in the Rift Valley province of Kenya. ((Jane Kabubo-Mariara. Land conservation and tenure security in Kenya: Boserup’s hypothesis revisited. Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 9 July 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.06.007)) The researcher, Jane Kabubo-Mariara of the University of Nairobi, was particularly interested in whether population density and land tenure arrangements had an effect on the likelihood of farmers constructing soil bunds and terraces and planting trees. She found that as population pressure increases, there is a “significant shift towards increased individualization of tenure” and also a “higher probability of adoption of soil bunds and planting drought-resistant vegetation.” Now, that’s fascinating enough, but what caught my attention was the dog that didn’t bark. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to know whether farmers in high density areas grew more or fewer crops, and more or fewer varieties of each?
The roots of Darfur
The world is waking up to the fact that competition for an eroding natural resources base is at least a contributing factors to the tensions of Darfur, whose tragic results then further exacerbate the problem in vicious positive feedback. But Jonathan Robinson said so some years back (via ADE). What took so long?