Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

Posted on

Ugandan discussions about Ankole

Jeremy has already blogged about these articles, but I didn’t get around to reading them until this past weekend, and a connection between them struck me, so forgive me for linking to them again. They’re both worth reading again anyway.

The first is a piece in Wilson Quarterly entitled The Coming Revolution in Africa. It purports to be optimistic about the future of African agriculture, but in fact it ends up being a bit of a downer, even if you accept its premise. Part of that premise is that agricultural experts have got it wrong in the past, which seems fair enough, but is it really the case that

Disdainful of the market, these agricultural specialists preferred to obsess over arcane questions about soil quality, seed varieties, and some mythical ideal of crop diversity. In classic ­butt-­covering mode, they blamed “market failures” and Africa’s geography for farmer’s low incomes and their vulnerability to famine and food ­shortages.

“Some mythical ideal of crop diversity”? What is that supposed to mean? But the quote that really struck me was this one:

Then he criticizes the country’s traditional ­big-­horned Ankole cattle. These animals are beautiful and beloved but provide very little milk, he says, “no matter how hard you squeeze.” He prefers European Friesian cows. “Five of them will produce the same as 50 Ankoles,” he ­says.

The person speaking is Gilbert Bukenya, vice president of Uganda. The comment jumped out at me because I had previously been reading about the views of his boss on the same topic:

President Yoweri Museveni once imposed a ban on imported semen. Museveni belongs to the Bahima ethnic group. When he was a baby, in a sort of Bahima baptism ritual, his parents placed him on the back of an Ankole cow with a mock bow and arrow, as if to commit him symbolically to the defense of the family’s herd. Museveni, now in his 60s, still owns the descendants of that very cow, and he retains a strong bond to the Ankole breed. Two years ago, I accompanied a group of Ugandan journalists on a daylong trip to one of the president’s private ranches, where he proudly showed us his 4,000-strong herd of Ankole cattle. At one point, a reporter asked if the ranch had any Holsteins. “No, those are pollution,” Museveni replied. “These,” he said, referring to his Ankoles, “the genetic material is superior.”

This latter quote comes from a long, careful piece in the New York Times about the future of the Ankole cattle.

There must be some very interesting cabinet meetings in Kampala.

Posted on

Hope will always grow

In Muzya, you find that rare blend…that elusive, intangible, yet unmistakable quality of a community that every development project dreams of working with…

I’m a sucker for first-person accounts of the stuff I sit in Rome and read about, and Thulasy B.’s blog Stories from Zambia never disappoints. This time she’s talking about a community that, against the odds, is proving a greater success than the ones that aid agencies had targetted. Thulasy would be the first to admit that it is hard to draw any generalizations, let alone predict which communities will be like Muyza and which will wither like maize in a drought year. No matter, as long as here are such communities, and at least some open-minded aid specialists, life will improve.

Posted on

Meta-analyzing diversity

If you’ve just arrived from Tangled Bank, welcome. And be aware that there’s a follow-up post.

A couple of meta-analyses on the menu today.

ResearchBlogging.org Devra Jarvis and Bioversity International colleagues, together with numerous co-authors from national programmes around the world, have a paper in PNAS summarizing the results of a 10-year effort to establish the scientific bases of on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity. ((Jarvis, D.I., Brown, A.H., Cuong, P.H., Collado-Panduro, L., Latournerie-Moreno, L., Gyawali, S., Tanto, T., Sawadogo, M., Mar, I., Sadiki, M., Hue, N.T., Arias-Reyes, L., Balma, D., Bajracharya, J., Castillo, F., Rijal, D., Belqadi, L., Rana, R., Saidi, S., Ouedraogo, J., Zangre, R., Rhrib, K., Chavez, J.L., Schoen, D., Sthapit, B., Santis, P.D., Fadda, C., Hodgkin, T. (2008). A global perspective of the richness and evenness of traditional crop-variety diversity maintained by farming communities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0800607105))

Varietal diversity ((The unit of analysis was the farmer-recognized and named variety.)) data on 27 crops grown on 64,000 ha by 2,041 households in 26 communities in 8 countries on 5 continents were pulled together in a stunning feat of synthesis. Are any generalizations possible from such a massive dataset? Well, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Let me pick out the highlights:

  1. Households growing traditional varieties generally grow more than one (1.38-4.25).
  2. Households within a community tend to grow somewhat different sets of traditional varieties.
  3. Larger fields generally have more traditional varieties, but smaller fields tend to be more different in varietal composition.

There’s much more to this rich analysis than that, but the take-home message can be pretty easily stated: crop genetic diversity can still be found on-farm because even neighbouring families choose to grow different traditional varieties, and generally more than one. Especially families tending smaller fields, who will presumably be poorer and living in more marginal conditions. The conoscenti will recognize a familiar meta-narrative, but it is good to have solid data from a wide range of crops and from all over the world.

The next paper I want to talk about looked at genetic diversity in wild clonal species as it relates to their breeding system. ((Honnay, O., Jacquemyn, H. (2008). A meta-analysis of the relation between mating system, growth form and genotypic diversity in clonal plant species. Evolutionary Ecology, 22(3), 299-312. DOI: 10.1007/s10682-007-9202-8))

Summarizing 72 genetic diversity studies, including of a couple of crop relatives, the authors found that populations of self-incompatible clonal species tended to have fewer genotypes, more unequally distributed (i.e., with a few dominant clones), than populations of self-compatible clonal species. It would be interesting to see if this relationship is also present in vegetatively propagated crops. I don’t think the previous dataset would help with that, however. Only two clonal crops were included in the on-farm analysis, cassava and taro. Interestingly, they had the highest average levels of community-level varietal richness (33) compared to seed-propagated species.