Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Rice vs millet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmHUsVlc8yY

We’ve mentioned before the efforts to support millet cultivation among the Hill Tribes of India. There’s even a BBC documentary about the work. The above video is not from the Kolli Hills, but the problem it illustrates is the same. Rice subsidies and mining are threatening the way of life of the Dongria Kondh.

Living Farms works with them to ensure availability of food for the entire year. This is being done by re-establishing their traditional farming system, by conserving the biodiversity of millet and uncultivated food.

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Disaster anthropology and agrobiodiversity

A post at antropologi.info, which covers anthropology in the news, discusses a recent master’s thesis by Uy Ngoc Bui which “looks at the role of NGOs, the state and the people themselves” in the efforts to recover from typhoon Durian after it hit Bến Tre province in Southern Vietnam on 5 December 2006. Although there’s nothing specifically on agrobiodiversity in the article, this quote from the thesis struck me as very relevant:

My experience is that more research should be done on the bridging of relief aid with long term reconstruction and development. Relief aid has become more efficient and standardised, which is positive, but this is only short term help for people who are in a vulnerable situation. Decreasing their vulnerability and strengthening their capacity to overcome disasters in the future should be the key foci of anthropologists and NGOs.

I would guess she’s mainly thinking about the sort of relief that involves the shelter and health of victims, but one could say very much the same thing about seed relief after disasters — and indeed, it has been said. “Decreasing [people’s] vulnerability and strengthening their capacity to overcome disasters in the future should be the key foci” not only of anthropologists but also of agronomists and breeders.

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Nibbles: Venezuela, Bangladesh, Climate change, Geographic indications, Dried herbs, Maize, Cydonia, Snakes, Hawaii, Pinot passion

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Back to the wild

As promised, the new BGjournal is out, and the topic is “Ecological restoration and the role of botanic gardens.” Remember, this is the one with the paper on inter situ conservation:

One of the first places that this idea has caught on is on the properties of the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) and those of collaborating landowners. At Lāwa’i-kai, the uniquely beautiful coastal property managed by NTBG as part of the historic Allerton Gardens on Kaua`i’s south shore, just a few kilometers from Makauwahi Cave, invasive vegetation has been removed from the beach strand and coastal forest and replaced with not just the three hardy native plant species that had persisted there, but dozens of other natives that cores collected from the adjacent marsh as well as the detailed record from other sites along the south shore such as Makauwahi shows were there when the Polynesians arrived a little more than a millennium ago.