From the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre, news of the ethnobotany garden. Dr Francis Ng reports that the half-hectare garden, which he designed, is flourishing, and that eventually he hopes to have more than 500 species — including Musa lokok, a previously unknown banana species — used by the local people on hand to study. The garden is close to the Orang Utan Centre at Semengok and has already been visited by schoolchildren. Eventually, Dr Ng says, tourists will be able to visit. Gardens of useful plants strike me as an excellent way to promote the virtues of agricultural biodiversity in a local context. I know of a couple, at Nabk in Syria and the Potato Park near Cusco, Peru, but there must be others.
Good ethnobotanists have healthier children
A study of the Tsimane, an indigenous group of foragers and farmers inhabiting a remote area of the Amazon lowlands of Bolivia, has determined that mothers who are more knowledgeable about plants and their uses tend to have healthier children. According to this summary of the results, Dr Victoria Reyes-GarcÃa, one of the co-authors of the study, pointed out that “globalization threatens this knowledge to the extent that formal schooling and jobs in emerging markets devalue folk knowledge and provide access to products not made from local resources, but without providing adequate medical treatment substitutes.” I’ll have to find the original paper, because what the summary doesn’t say, and which it would be great to know, is whether better ethnobotanical knowledge translated into more diverse family gardens and more diverse diets.
Horticulture and the city
There’s a great feature in the latest New Agriculturist on urban horticulture, with stories ranging from growing food in buckets in Lima to grafting tomatoes on eggplant roots in Vietnam to producing jasmine in the Philippines.
Millet beer
Via Timbuktu Chronicles, a great description – with photos – of how they make millet beer in Mali.
Drum Beat on IK
The Drum Beat is “a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development.” This week’s edition focuses on indigenous knowledge and has lots of good stuff, including for example information on an online database of Tibetan folk medicines.