Nibbles: Berries, Women, Marsh Arabs, Maple, Sorghum, Nuts, Conference, Banana

More on mapping agrobiodiversity threats

Hot on the heels of a map showing how warfare has spared hardly any biodiversity hotspot in the past 50 years comes one on another possible threat to agricultural biodiversity. UNESCO has just announced the publication of its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There’s a great interactive website all ready for people to start playing with. Below is a screen shot (there doesn’t seem to be a way to export maps, alas) showing critically endangered languages with fewer than 50 speakers in South and Central America. Worldwide there are 318 such languages.

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I’d say a disappearing language was a pretty good proxy for risk of crop genetic erosion. So much to mash up, so little time.

Nibbles: Rituals, Pig, Diseases, Beer, Hog, Fair

  • The Green Revolution has messed with rice rituals in Bengal.
  • National Pig Day is coming up. Bacon for breakfast at last!
  • The Star Trek tricorder finally arrives, though only for plant diseases so far.
  • Organic beer can be good. You had me at beer.
  • Speakin’ of bacon, make mine endangered.
  • Biodiversity Fair held in Bhutan “to recognise the farmers’ contribution …; create awareness … and encourage farmers …; promote in situ conservation and … ex situ (gene bank) conservation; and provide … opportunities to exchange seeds.”

Hawaiian agrobiodiversity memories

I came across an evocative little piece in The Garden Island on Sunday, thanks to a Google alert. It’s about an upcoming course on permaculture design that will be looking in depth at the ahupua’a, the old Hawaiian practice of land subdivision and management.

To ensure adequate space for forests and agriculture in each ahupua’a, pre-colonial Hawaiian communities applied careful land-use planning. Valley floors, where the most fertile soil is concentrated, were reserved for agriculture. They often included walled-terraces developed to grow kalo (taro), the most important staple food crop for Hawaiians. Houses were built on hillsides and in sandy areas in order to save prime agricultural lands. As contemporary Kaua’i attempts to move towards more self-sufficient communities, we can look towards this model of reserving prime agricultural lands for agriculture to perpetuate our ability to feed ourselves.

The piece reminded me of a visit I made with the family to the Limahuli Garden and Preserve on Kaua’i. It’s a beautiful place, explicitly organized around the ahupua’a concept.
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And it even maintains small collections of different varieties of local root crops such as taro and sweet potato. Which was mainly why I was there. Although the visit came too late to allow me to include the data in the directory of Pacific collections. Maybe the next edition…
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Up is the new down

Further to Luigi’s trend-setting (and spotting) piece positing that an economic downturn could mean an upturn for agricultural biodiversity, I note from our friend Danny Hunter’s blog that LEISA is asking its local partners a couple of germane questions:

What are the effects of the global economic crisis that you see in your own environment, at the level of target groups (e.g. food prices, changes in agriculture, availability of credit, etc…)?

Does it affect the functioning of your own organisations or networks? How?

Answers are coming in, and LEISA is continuing the discussion on an open forum. Anyone care to fillet the answers for agrobiodiversity-specific information?