Category: Livestock

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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.

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Nibbles: Tangled Bank

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Imagining the past

And another trifecta to round off the day, this one of stories about the historical remains of agrobiodiversity, in a broad sense.

We start with an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph about a genetic study of the skulls of a couple of lions from the menagerie which medieval royalty maintained in the Tower of London. It turns out they were Barbary lions from North Africa, now sadly extinct. Ok, they’re not strictly speaking agricultural biodiversity, but it’s a fun story and I couldn’t resist it.

Next there’s news of an excavation in Egypt which revealed the buried remain of donkeys. I think we actually nibbled this a few days ago in another guise, but the NY Times article is worth reading. The find is interesting because although the donkeys were definitely used as pack animals (the evidence is wear and tear on the bones), they didn’t look any different from wild asses — at least as far as their bones are concerned. Certainly they were no smaller, and a rapid reduction in size has been seen as a marker of animal domestication — the domestication syndrome. So, time for a rethink there.

And, finally, the Boston Globe has a piece on an exhibition of Jewish mosaics from Roman North Africa, entitled “Tree of Paradise” because of its depictions of nature’s bounty. Ancient representations of plants and animals are fascinating, because they are really the only way we can know the external phenotype of old, extinct breeds and varieties. There are unfortunately no pictures in the article, and the exhibition website only has one. Pity.