Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Amazonian myth-busting

You may remember a piece in SciDev a couple of years back which justly celebrated EMBRAPA’s genebank. There was an brief, intriguing statement towards the end:

This has been done by several indigenous communities — such as the Krahô, Guarani and Indian tribes from the Xingu river basin in Brazil — that approached Embrapa asking for primitive plants seeds that no longer germinate. The species were important not only to their agricultural system but also to their cultural rituals.

I had heard of this “restoration,” of course: a great story, dutifully trotted out when it is necessary to give an example of direct use of genebank materials, one not involving breeders. But it emerged during the meeting I’m attending that the conventional narrative is not quite correct. It turns out that the seeds that were “returned” to the Krahô had actually not been collected from them, but from a neighbouring tribe, in Tocatins. Ok, it is still direct use of ex situ conserved material by indigenous communities, but somehow not as resonant as formerly, at least for me. I hate it when that happens.

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Non-wood forest products digested but not fed

The new NWFP-Digest is out. At least if you get the alert from FAO by email. If you go to the “Current issue” page on the website you still get the last issue. It should change in the next few days. But why no RSS feed? I’m beginning to think it’s just me that thinks RSS feeds can significantly boost ease of use at no cost.

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Downmarket

More on the effect of the economic downturn on agrobiodiversity. First, there’s a series of reports from markets around the world from the BBC. A couple include information on food. From Beijing:

In the face of the economic crisis, Ms Liu said Chinese people are going back to buying basic vegetables like Chinese cabbage and potatoes.

And from Crawford Market, Mumbai:

Even spice sellers are feeling the pinch. Jabbar Prajapati says the cost of saffron has rocketed from 60 rupees (£0.82 / $1.20) per gram last year, to 300 rupees (£4 / $6) per gram. “People are not ready to buy at those prices,” he says.

Also, The Economist has a story about “victory gardens” in Little Rock, Arkansas. The money quote:

Many gardeners are focusing on “heirloom plants” rare varieties from earlier times that do not appeal to agribusiness.

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Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain

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Aluka on agrobiodiversity

Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. “Aluka”, is derived from a Zulu word meaning “to weave”, reflecting Aluka’s commitment to connect resources and scholars from around the world. In 2008, we announced that Aluka is uniting with JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization building trusted digital archives for the global scholarly community.

An amazing resource, which has a section on African plants, including crops and their wild relatives, e.g. Sorghum.

Access to some things (e.g. photos of herbarium specimens) “is provided through participation by not-for-profit institutions of higher education, as well as secondary schools, public libraries, museums, and other research or cultural institutions across the globe.” Is anyone out there a member? Tell us about it.