Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Yams in New Caledonia

Danny has just sent me this great old postcard from New Caledonia: “Preparations for a family celebration.” You can see how central yams are to Kanak culture. In 2004 the Kanak Traditional Senate established a Conservatoire de l’Igname. I never visited it, but I saw photos of it when a couple of the people responsible, including a senator, came to our regional plant genetic resources network meeting in Fiji a couple of years ago, and it looked great. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have much of an online presence.  Yet.

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Resources on PNG food plants

Bruce French taught Food Crop Production at Vudal University in the 1970s and wrote a number of books on the food plants of PNG. These are now sadly out of print, but fear not. I’ll let him take up the story:

In recent years I have continued to put together information for PNG, along with my wider project of trying to describe all the food plants of the world. At this stage I have several books written, available as computerised books in pdf format, on Food Plants, Pests and Diseases and Food Composition for PNG. These are all available on the website, www.foodplantsinternational.com, and can be downloaded. As they are fairly large books, and may take a while to download, it may be easier for me to send them to people within PNG on DVD/CD. There are also other resources such as photos, databases, etc. that could also be made available. The information should be useful for agriculture workers, teachers, health workers and other interested people.

You can find the publications here. They’re wonderful.

Via Didinet Issue 8, 2008 (not online).

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Research on crofting reveals oppression, not much else

A few days ago a short article in the Farmers Guardian, a British rural newspaper, mentioned what sounds like an interesting research project: “Crofters: Indigenous People of the Highlands and Islands.” Unfortunately, a look at the Scottish Crofting Foundation website doesn’t reveal much more information. It would have been nice to know, for example, whether the project looked at the contribution crofters make to on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity. Surely there was more to the project than a glossy brochure moaning about the oppression of indigenous crofters. Maybe Maria Scholten will be able to tell us.

Meanwhile, in another part of darkest Britain, another traditional lifestyle based on the management and use of agricultural biodiversity — thatching — is having to go through bureaucratic hoops. I’ll let Danny over at Rurality tell you all about it. Would be funny if it wasn’t sad. Traditional doesn’t mean unchanging, guys.

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Nibbles: Aromatics, local food, rice, trade, cetriolo mate, maize, sweet potato, media