Indigenous knowledge systems

September 10, 2011

Punjabis saving iconic Italian cheese

It was almost exactly 345 years ago that Samuel Pepys famously dug a hole in his garden in order to save his parmesan cheese from the Great Fire of London:

…and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.

I like to think the great diarist would have been fascinated to know both that production of that caseinic wonder continues to this day around Parma (with the no doubt invaluable protection of the European Union), and that it is currently largely in the hands of Sikh immigrants:

In the middle of the Po Valley, where the xenophobic Northern League has its core voters, there is now a symbol that coexistence between different cultures and religions can work very well. In Pessina Cremonese, between Mantua and Cremona, the largest Sikh temple in Europe was recently inaugurated. And all agree: without this Indian folk and religious community this area would be much poorer, and typical Italian products such as Parmesan cheese would perhaps be no more.

September 10, 2011September 9, 2011

Himalayan landraces and climate change

I think it may be worth unpacking yesterday’s Himalayan Nibble a little bit. It all started with an IPS story about Nepali women abandoning hybrids and other imported varieties for local landraces in the face of drier and hotter conditions. That’s becoming a metanarrative of sorts, but the interesting thing about this particular example of adaptation is that it came out of a WWF project.

When WWF-Nepal started consultations with villagers on how to protect water resources and crops, the women pointed out that the indigenous seeds they had used in the past were better suited to the changing weather conditions.

One doesn’t as a rule credit WWF with much of an interest in agriculture, or at least I don’t — or didn’t. I’ve now learned better. The piece also highlights the role of community seedbanks (CSB).

Operating from a room in a one-storey building, the seed bank today stocks 68 varieties of seeds, including grains like rice, maize and millets, and vegetables like tomato, green chilli, cauliflower and cabbage. The women’s cooperative runs from the adjacent room.

Which is quite a coincidence because yesterday also saw the paper “Banking for the future: savings, security and seeds: a short study of community seed banks in Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Nepal, Thailand, Zambia and Zimbabwe” summarized over at Eldis. One of the recommendations of the study is that:

agricultural research institutions should extend their expertise and services for free to assist and support communities and NGOs in setting up and maintaining CSBs

Fair enough, but what about extension? I ask because also on Eldis, on the same day, we find the study “Determinants of adoption and extent of agricultural intensification in the central mid-hills of Nepal,” which concludes that:

sustainable agricultural intensification can be achieved by improving extension programmes, credit provision, infrastructural services and the promotion of irrigation facilities

Anyway, be that as it may, I think we can all agree that there’s something interesting going on in Nepal in terms of the use of landraces to adapt to climate change. It may not be the answer, but it certainly seems to be an answer. So why, pray tell, are they not listening in Bhutan? There’s definitely not much talk of community seedbanks and the role of landraces in a SciDev piece, again out on the same day mind, on the problems being faced by that country’s farmers due to climate change. Ah, but:

An upcoming regional meeting on climate change in the Himalayas, to be held in Bhutan in November 2011, will see experts discussing water, energy and biodiversity and devising strategies to build climate change resilience for food security in the region.

I hope those Nepali women with their community seedbank will be invited.

September 9, 2011September 9, 2011

Nibbles: Rice biofortification, Wild walnuts, Himalayan agriculture, Eating invasives, Gissen on wine, Medicinal fungus, Soil initiative, Ag development in S Sudan, AVRDC and WorldFish, Value chains

Boffins to rice: Pump it Up!
Saving the nuts of Central Asia.
Nepali women abandon hybrids for landraces and community seedbanks. Weird thing is that it’s a WWF project. But where are the extensionists? If only they had listened in Bhutan. Ok that packed a lot of links in there.
Never saw an invasive I didn’t like.
Architectural theorist tackles wine. Not many people hurt.
Turns out 57 insect species can play host to that famous medicinal fungus that led to war between Tibetan communities a couple of years back. Which helps how?
An envelope is opened at FAO.
Seeds come to South Sudan. One hopes they are of the right kinds. And that somebody is collecting what was there before. Maybe someone should call WWF.
You want vegetables with your fish?
Crops for the Future says not all middlemen bad.

September 8, 2011September 8, 2011

Home of the potato

Pamela Anderson, Director General of the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru

Home of the potato, a set by PRI’s The World on Flickr.

Today’s PRI piece on how an old potato is helping Andean farmers cope with climate change also points to some fun spud photos (see above) which are in fact all of potatoes, unlike in the recent NatGeo disaster. And to a great video of CIP Director General Pamela Anderson eating chips (crisps), which she really shouldn’t do because they’re not very healthy (the chips, not the potatoes), but what the hell.

September 8, 2011

The taxman doesn’t like root crops

The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as “slash and burn”), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous policies like taxation, conscription, and forced labor.

Now, I don’t know if this is a valid summary of the thesis of James C. Scott’s latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009), or a flight of fancy on the part of the reviewer of the book in The Chronicle of Higher Education. But characterizing swidden agriculture based on root crops as part of a strategy of tax evasion by the hill tribes of SE Asia is certainly novel.