Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

Posted on

News from the front

Regular readers know that I value reports from people working with rural farmers to try and improve things. I confess I don’t subscribe to them all — life’s too short — but they generally turn up in one of my searches or another. The implication is that if either of these is new to you, you might want to go back and get a flavour of the blogs’ history. Anyway …

Stu in Rwanda regales us with a house-warming party and, more to the point, a little update on the project he’s working on. Take two women, working the same size plot. One is growing five white, starchy staples. She’s growing them well, but that’s all she’s growing, and her child is in the malnutrition ward. Her neighbour “had incorporated small-scale livestock, was improving her land with manure and compost, and had diversified with perennial fruits and annual vegetables”. Why the difference? Well, that’s what Stu is trying to find out. And you can find out why he is happy when his stuff gets stolen; shades of Parmentier’s potatoes.

In Ghana, Jenneke describes the difficulties of getting farmers to share accurate information. It’s all a question of local norms. Asking a Ghanaian how many cows he has is, it seems, a bit like asking a Dutchman how much he has in the bank. And while the Dutch are reticent on the topic of what I like to call “night soil,” Ghanaians are forthright: “We would love to get the shit from the city, with that the crops grow well, but a lot of people want to have it. Only when you pay they give it to you”. Will Jenneke get the data she (?) needs?

Maybe I will subscribe.

Posted on

Nibbles: Global Food, Aid, Nettles, Women, Aquaculture, Education

Posted on

Reindeer domestication

From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.

Reindeer have been domesticated by denizens of the Northern hemisphere for some time – but exactly for how long and  whether domestication occurred at different sites or only once has been the matter of some debate. Estimates of how long ago domestication might have happened have ranged from as long as 20,000 years ago to as little as 3000. Part of the problems stems from the lack of archaeological records that could pinpoint  a more exact time frame. The evidence for the shorter period relies mostly on ethnographic observation, such as the development of certain implements (for example saddles) that early reindeer herders developed apparently after contact with other people of the central Asian steppes.

But did domestication  happen more than once? A recent paper by a group of researchers from Oslo sheds some light on this question.  After analysis of a number of DNA markers they conclude that the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia domesticated reindeer independently from indigenous people in what is now Russia.  Moreover the evidence points to the existence of three distinct gene pools suggesting that domestication even within Russia may have occurred more than once.

And there  is another interesting observation: comparisons with gene markers from wild reindeer suggests that introgression of “wild” genes into domestic reindeer appears to have happened quite frequently through the ages,  but that only some of the  wild populations have made genetic contributions suggesting perhaps different propensities for domestication among animals of various wild herds.

Unfortunately there is increasing concern about the future of reindeer agriculture. The Sami herders, who live in Scandinavia, Finland and parts of Russia, are beginning to feel the effects of global climate changes. The rapid warming trend that seems to occur in the Northern hemisphere interferes not only with foraging but also with the ability to move animals across what used to be solid ice. And many Sami now fear not only the loss of their livelihood, but also the disappearance of a substantial part of the culture, which has always been intricately linked to reindeer. Â