Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

Posted on

Feet of clay

Img 2527

That’s another one to tick off the life list. Above you see Zhu Youyong, who describes himself as a farmer. He happens also to be Distinguished Professor Zhu, President of Yunnan Agricultural College and a hero of mine.

Zhu’s name is associated with a method of growing rice that delivers higher, more stable yields with lower inputs of fungicides and a more stable harvest from year to year. Not bad for an amazingly simple idea. The problem is that traditional landraces of sticky rice, which farmers like to grow and to eat, are susceptible to fungal disease. They also have a nasty tendency to fall over, or lodge, especially when they are carrying a bountiful load of seed. Modern hybrids are disease resistant, and high-yielding, but the taste is not much to write home about. Yields are high, but prices are low. To grow the tasty traditional landraces, farmers need to be able to afford fungicides and they need to be able to overcome their tendency to lodge.

Continue reading “Feet of clay”

Posted on

Disappearing languages, disappearing agrobiodiversity

There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken around the world. By 2100, there will half that, if we’re lucky. That’s according to Harrison and Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, who “traveled the world to interview the last speakers of critically endangered languages as part of the National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices Project.” Here’s a telling quote from Harrison Anderson:

Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it’s only in people’s heads.

Just compare the map of hotspots of language loss with those of centres of crop origin and diversity. When the last native speakers of those 3,500 doomed languages go in the next century or so, they’ll be taking with them irreplaceable knowledge of agricultural biodiversity. Knowledge which we’ll need to make the most of that agrobiodiversity, and indeed to conserve it in situ (should we wish to) ((Or, indeed, should we be able to, given what climate change is going to do. Anyway, thanks to Ola for pointing out the article.)).

Posted on

Green Millennium Revolution Villages debated

I’ve blogged a few times before about the Millennium Villages. An initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University launched in 2004, the Millennium Villages project aims “to demonstrate how the eight Millennium Development Goals can be met in rural Africa within five years through community-led development.” ((“The Millennium Village effort is explicitly linked to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and addresses an integrated and scaled-up set of interventions covering food production, nutrition, education, health services, roads, energy, communications, water, sanitation, enterprise diversification and environmental management. This has never been done before.”))

Pedro Sanchez, director of the Millennium Villages Project, The Earth Institute at Columbia University debated the project, and also Africa’s proposed new Green Revolution (another frequent subject hereabouts), with the anthropologist Paul Richards of Wageningen University yesterday at the Development Studies Association Annual Conference. That’s going on at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK.

Would have been great to be there, and ask why it is that supporting the Millennium Villagers manage and enhance their agrobiodiversity doesn’t seem to be much on the agenda. But here’s the next best thing: a description of the encounter, one of a series of entries on the conference you’ll find at The Crossing, the blog of the STEPS Centre. ((“The Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS) Centre is a major new interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement hub combining development with science and technology studies. The STEPS Centre addresses two global challenges: linking environmental sustainability with better livelihoods and health; and making science and technology work to reduce poverty and increase social justice.”))

Here’s an intriguing snippet from the blog:

Richards says the Green Revolution induces spread of innovation by showing the seed system the “correct” pattern. But an alternative can be based on unsupervised learning that already takes place, he adds, whizzing through some very big and interesting ideas very quickly.

Kinda makes you wish you’d been there in person, doesn’t it?

Posted on

Farmer field schools in Burkina Faso

Farmer field schools are growing in popularity, as a way for farmers and technocrats alike to learn what works and why in real life. From The Rodale Institute, one of the foremost organic organizations in the United States, comes a lengthy feature article about how things operate in Burkina Faso. Relentlessly upbeat, it gives the low-down on the individual farmers who make farmer field schools such a success. An excellent read.