Category: History

It happens sometimes. You see a bunch of apparently random, unrelated things, and then after a while suddenly it hits you that there’s a thread of sorts running through them after all. It’s a trick of the mind, of course, but still. Take my reading these past few days. It included a review of an old exhibition on the historical links between Venice and the Orient (an interest of mine), a newspaper article on the latest developments on Cyprus (an old stamping ground of mine) and a paper from the International Institute of Social Studies on food sovereignty (homework). I suppose I should not have been surprised, but the nexus of agrobiodiversity (and its products) and politics turned out to be a point of connection among these, if maybe not an actual thread. Here’s how.

Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 was the title of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2007. There was a review of it at the time in the NY Review of Books, which I ran into at the weekend while binge-reading William Dalrymple stuff. Among many great observations, there was this little gem on the diplomatic missions between Venice and Egypt:

The emissaries would have been carrying large numbers of Parmesan cheeses, apparently the diplomatic gifts most eagerly favored by appreciative sixteenth-century Mamluk governors.

I don’t know what it was, maybe the slightly surreal image of a Venetian trireme being unloaded at some slippery Nilotic dock, the sweaty Parmesan wheels hoisted laboriously onto richly baldaquined camels as turbaned dragomans look on, but the sentence stuck with me. ((Apologies for the Orientalist daydream.)) And so did the following, this morning, while scanning a piece in the International Herald Tribune on the latest, hopeful signs from the tragically divided island of Cyprus. I spent several years there back in the 90s, and I try to stay informed:

In 2010, the community planted a Peace Park, an oasis with 1,100 carob trees and a playground. Soon after, the group restored a dilapidated Frankish cloister abutting the church, less than 500 feet from a Turkish mosque towering in the sun.

See, there it is again, agrobiodiversity helping out with politics.

Ah, but wait. I really should not be calling it that at all, should I. Because, according to Patrick Mulvany in a footnote in the paper Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, which you may remember we nibbled last week:

The term Agricultural Biodiversity is, in the English language, the accepted term in the United Nations FAO and CBD and by many authors that come from a public interest perspective. It is also a useful term in that it highlights the ‘cultural’ dimension. The reductionist term ‘agrobiodiversity’, though common in translation in other languages (and translation from those languages), is sometimes used by institutions and individuals who consider agricultural biodiversity mainly as an exploitable resource.

And there I was thinking that “agricultural biodiversity” and “agrobiodiversity” were completely interchangeable terms. How naive of me. Don’t you just love agricultural biodiversity? There’s politics even in what you call it.