- FAO sets data free. About time.
- Presentation on drought risk and preparedness around the world. Nice maps.
- A Facebook for seeds?
- The diversity of Jerusalem artichoke. In France.
- Coffee certification 101.
- Nice plug for SPC’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees.
- The fig of choice in San Francisco.
- Back to traditional rice varieties in India. But forward to new pigeonpea varieties in Malawi. Go figure.
- Navajo tea. Would love to try it.
- “The mixed (east-west) affiliation of Mongolian cattle parallels the mixed affiliation of Mongolians themselves.”
- Lancet article mentions Lois Englberger and her Go Local work in the Pacific in context of diabetes epidemic in Asia-Pacific.
- Edible art.
- More on bringing back the aurochs. Does anyone really want one, though?
- Great variety of rare and exotic poultry breeds. Temptation to pun smuttily averted, mostly.
Nibbles: Climate change, Monitoring, Evaluation, Vegetables, FAO newsletters, Guardians
- Climate change to bring lemons in Kent. Now for the bad news.
- Monitoring biodiversity in Africa and India.
- More Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE) research facilities needed, say those who work there.
- Ethnic vegetables? Yep, you heard me.
- Non-Wood Forest Products and Plant Breeding newsletters are out. Subscribe already!
- W.S. Merwin: poet and Guardian of Biodiversity.
Sheep at Floatingsheep and among the Navajo
Floatingsheep.org is a great website “dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks.” Always fun, it occasionally even tackles agrobiodiversity issues. I’m still waiting for the guys to look at the distribution of the crops of the world, but for now I’ll have to settle for livestock. Here’s a quick look. There are closeups of different regions on the original post.
Those sheep hotspots in Arizona and New Mexico are no doubt due to the revival of the Navajo’s churro, the subject of an NPR story yesterday. And of one of our longer posts some months back. Yep, nothing much gets past us.
Nibbles: Haitian mangoes, Dog bones, Vitis in Georgia, Lavandula in Tunisia, Pistacia in Chios, Rice wine in Korea, Nutella, Mozzarella, Gloucester Old Spot, Cowpea
- Buy Haiti’s Francis mangoes!
- The Muge dog was, in fact, a dog.
- Looking at the grapevine in its center of origin.
- Need to fence lavender populations in Tunisia to protect them.
- More Mediterranean stuff. History of the mastic trade in an Aegean island.
- Making “drunken rice” in Korea. Sign me up.
- Nutella to come with warning label? Jeremy says: We don’t need no nanny state!
- Bluish mozzarella balls confiscated. Jeremy says: Ok, maybe we do after all.
- EU makes itself useful and protects bacon pig of choice, with built-in apple sauce to boot.
- “…finding how the physical and chemical composition of different cowpea varieties influence human health, reduce obesity and prevent diseases like cancer, hypertension and heart related ailments.”
Swap crops and feed 9 billion people
From Jacob van Etten.
Some demographic projections tell us that global population numbers will grow to 9 billion in 2100 and stabilize around this number. So how can people three generations down the line feed themselves, while still conserving biodiversity?
Lian Pin Koh offers a solution based on simple economic principles. Grow the most productive crop to produce cereal, oil or protein, and grow each crop where it grows best. He presents an interactive world map to demonstrate that no extra land needs to be taken into production to feed 9 billion people.
The results are interesting. Strikingly, Brazil is doing just fine. Just a bit more of rice and Brazilian agriculture is optimal. Other countries need to change drastically. North European countries need to switch from barley to wheat. Canada and Russia need to abolish wheat agriculture and adopt maize. West Africa and the Cono Sur needs to grow more rice but northern South America and the US need to grow more maize. Yields will go up automagically, as each crop is planted on land that is more suited to it, fulfilling the dream of the 1980s land use evaluators.
The study is still in preparation and no background info on the methodology is available yet. Transport costs and climate change do not seem to be taken into account. “Optimal” seems to refer to yields per hectare, not to labour and inputs. Overall, the trend seems to be towards more high-yielding crops, which also require more inputs. With more people, more labour is available. But other inputs, like water, are limited.
Another question would be why crop use is sub-optimal now. Is it trade barriers? Cultural preferences and agricultural traditions? Or is it economics, really?
There is of course more to conservation than making agriculture more efficient. Another study shows that intensifying land use does not in fact put a break on crop land expansion. Additional measures would be needed to ensure that more efficiency indeed stops crops taking over non-agricultural land, and impacting biodiversity.
Even so, this is an interesting thought experiment. In an ideal world, swapping crops is enough to raise crop production some 30%. Feeding 9 billion people suddenly appears a bit easier.