Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I know it is impossible to believe, but we’ve been straining nourishing chunks from the effluvium that courses through the interwebs for three whole years. Would you do something for us?
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is the English proverb that sums up the value of agricultural biodiversity better than almost anything else. 1
Are you aware of equivalents in other languages? Stick them in the comments. Please. We’ll do something with them, eventually.
SciDev.net reports on a project launched a couple of years ago to unite farmers, weather-wallahs and government in Benin to “help farmers make informed choices about when to sow and harvest crops”. About 300 farmers are enrolled in 60 field schools across the country.
[T]o develop, test and implement farming strategies suited to local conditions. These include mulching, planting pits, adopting integrated crop management and using organic fertilisers.
What, no agricultural biodiversity? No new varieties or crop selection? No participatory plant breeding? We think they’re missing a trick.
We like toddy here. We like to drink it, when we can. And we like to blog about it. We don’t like to read that it is threatened by nasty phytoplasma diseases which “have weakened the health and vitality of coconut trees resulting in scarcity of Kuttanad’s-own pure toddy (Madura Kallu).” Can nothing be done?
Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.
And for that very agrobiodiversity-relevant insight she has just won the Nobel Prize for Economics.