Category: In situ

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African protected areas surveyed

The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:

The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.

It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.

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Weekly helping of potatoes

The Economist seems to have a thing about potatoes this week. There’s a story about how Peru is trying to cash in on its spud heritage. (Note to editor: the olluco is not a type of potato.) There’s a book review, of John Reader’s Propitious Esculent. And there’s even an editorial explaining how the humble tuber is at the root — as it were — of globalization. The International Year of the Potato cannot be over too quickly.

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A modest proposal

That last but one post of Jeremy’s got me thinking. How do we find out if Arachis ipaensis is still at that locality? I mean, short of mounting a fully-fledged expedition of groundnut experts at vast expense, that is. One way might be to ask a local person to check for us. Ok, a wild peanut species might not be the best thing to try this with, but you get the idea. Problem is, how do we identify a local person who knows that area?

Then I remembered something Jeremy sent me recently. WikiLoc is a website to which you can upload your favourite walk or cycle ride as a GPS track. You can then view all these in a number of different ways, including in Google Earth. So I gbiffed (sensu Cherfas, 2008) the localities of wild Arachis species and viewed them in Google Earth together with all the tracks from South America available on WikiLoc.

Well, of course, none of the trails was anywhere near the locality of A. ipaensis. But I did find others that came near — or very near — the localities of other species. Check this one out, for example:

It’s a 32 km circuit around Piribebuy in Paraguay, and it was uploaded by someone called Yagua. It takes about 4 hours to walk it. And it so happens that a specimen of Arachis glabrata was collected along Yagua’s favourite trail, around its southeastern corner:

glabrata-closeup.jpg

Now, I don’t think A. glabrata is a particularly significant component of the groundnut genepool, but say, for the sake of argument, that it had been. Couldn’t we ask Yagua to keep an eye on it for us? Multiply by the more than 10,000 tracks on WikiLoc and pretty soon you’re talking about a real global network of agrobiodiversity monitors. But maybe we should test the idea out with a somewhat more — ahem — charismatic plant. And imagine if germplasm collectors start adding their tracks to WikiLoc.

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Hot cocoa

fairtrade.jpgThe Fairtrade Foundation licenses this special mark to distinguish products that have been certified as meeting certain producer and trading standards, meant to ensure that small-scale producers and plantation workers in the developing world get a better deal. The producers “receive a minimum price that covers the cost of sustainable production and an extra premium that is invested in social or economic development projects.” And farmers are thus given an incentive to maintain agrobiodiversity on farm. However, as an article in last week’s Economist points out, this model is not particularly popular among the large corporations that control the global trade in agricultural commodities: “Fairtrade’s price-adjustment mechanism is intended to insulate small producers from volatile commodity markets and the free-trading, no-holds-barred capitalism that multinational companies espouse.”

And yet, Fairtrade-like strategies — The Economist calls them “Fairtrade lite” — are increasingly popular: “firms are finding ways to improve the lot of small farmers, and burnish their own reputations, without signing up to Fairtrade’s rules.” The article describes the latest example.

It is called the “Cadbury Cocoa Partership,” and it commits that multinational to investing US$87 million over 10 years in increasing cacao yields in Ghana. That country provides Cadbury Shweppes with 70% of its global needs (100% of its UK needs), amounting to 10% of Ghana’s production. A recent study showed that yields have been decreasing and youngsters leaving the farms, imperilling supply. Cadbury does use a Fairtrade-certified cocoa (from Belize), but in this case it decided that the problem was not so much price as productivity, and came up with its own scheme.

Intercropping will be encouraged (peppers, mangoes, coconuts) as an additional income option, wells dug to free up the time of women and girls, and schools and libraries built, equipped and staffed. But it is unclear how productivity is to be increased. The article says that “the aim of the venture is to show cocoa farmers how to increase yields using fertilisers and by working with each other.” Surely that’s not going to be enough. Hopefully cacao genetic resources conservation, evaluation and breeding work will also be supported. ((There’s a good summary of the importance of diversity in a New Agriculturalist focus feature on cacao, but it is from a few years back.))