Vel Gnanendran heads the Tanzania office of DFID, the UK’s Department for International Development. He recently decided to find out as much as he could about agriculture in Tanzania, and his report is an interesting read. Here’s part of his conclusion:
Farmers operate in a world of tremendous uncertainty. What will the world price of the crop be when it comes to harvest time? Will government policy be the same next season? Will the rains come this year? What is the cost benefit of investing in seeds and fertilisers? And, related but hardest of all, will someone buy the crop at a decent price? I have a degree in economics, but this is akin to applied quantum game theory.
Global markets and prices are important, for sure, but it would be good to see a little more emphasis on supply food to local markets, rather than seeing agriculture purely as oriented to global markets.
Quakers have an opinion on the right to food and climate change. Well, why shouldn’t they? They also have a UN office, but that’s another story. No word on whether they made the Weather Channel.
Ok, so apparently the answer is data. Says a data company. And open data at that. Quakers nonplussed.
There really is nothing like photos of agricultural biodiversity to set the pulse racing. Well, at least in our weird little corner of cyberspace. It’s been crazy over on Twitter and Facebook, what with frenzied sharing of, and commenting on, a couple of stories about, of all things, watermelons. Well, it is summer, I guess: they don’t call it the silly season for nothing.
To recap for those who do not follow us on other media, 1 people seem to have really been impressed by the photos which accompanied a story on the sequencing of the watermelon genome. Although it dates back to three years ago, for some reason it resurfaced again last week.
Flesh diversity from undomesticated to domesticated watermelon. These watermelon plants were grown at Syngenta Woodland station in CA.
It may well have been resurrected because of a Vox.com story on how James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, is using Renaissance paintings of watermelons and other produce to illustrate the changes that have been wrought by modern plant breeding. The story was later taken up by others, and bounced around a lot. And all long before National Watermelon Day. And also before the AoB post on watermelon origins.
Well, let me add to the hysteria. Courtesy of my friend Dr Yawooz Adham, here’s another fantastic agrobiodiversity photo, of tomatoes this time.
The farmer’s name is Shiek Jamally Karbanchi 2 and he lives in a village near the town of Chamchamal, between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. He tends 22 different tomato varieties, and is clearly incredibly proud of them. Though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t charge Euros 20 each for them. I don’t know if they’re all commercial varieties or whether there’s a few local heirlooms in there, but either way it’s damn impressive.
It’s not clear whether it was due to her magisterial BBC programme Plants: From Roots to Riches, but Prof. Kathy Willis has won the Royal Society’s prestigious Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences. You’ll remember the programme features genebanks quite prominently. Well worth listening to. Congratulations to Prof. Willis, who is Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
