One — or at least part of one — of the great agrobiodiversity-themed art works of the ancient world is back. Apart from “Fowling in the marshes,” reproduced below, Nebamun’s painted tomb includes representations of a garden pool, wine-making, and food offerings.
Photograph: The British Museum
Videos on traditional food systems
The Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) based in McGill University, Canada, responded to requests from indigenous leaders from around the world to help stop loss of traditional food system knowledge with research and community-driven activities that bridge the generation.
This series of videos presents highlights from 12 indigenous community areas in 9 countries, and is intended to con tribute to the evidence base used to make global policies to protect Indigenous Peoples’ food resources and promote good health.
Thanks to Lois Englberger for the tip.
Livestock bring books, ice cream
Donkeys are being used to cart books around the Ethiopian countryside as part of a literacy campaign.
The donkeys are not just a gimmick – in rural Ethiopia and provincial towns like Awassa, horse-drawn buggies and donkey carts are a normal form of transport.
But the project also tries to teach the children about respect for animals.
Donkeys here are generally despised and often ill-treated, but these two working donkeys wear the colourful embroidered trappings usually reserved for riding horses.
Northern Kenya, in contrast, has camel libraries. Speaking of camels, we’ve just missed the Pushkar Camel Fair. But I wonder if we’re too late for the camel ice cream.
Traditional African vegetables hit the mainstream
It’s not really all that long since we brought together researchers on that overlooked portion of African agrobiodiversity that is its traditional vegetables for one of the first ever times. I wonder how many of us ever thought that in little more that 10 years we would be able to buy terere and managu and the like wrapped in plastic and barcoded in supermarkets in Kenya:
Or indeed buy nicely packaged and labelled seed from small agricultural suppliers in places like Limuru:
Preparation is time-consuming and fiddly, sure:
But the taste and nutrients are worth it, as more and more people are finding out. We had some Amaranthus for Christmas lunch, from grandma’s shamba. Can’t get much more mainstream than that.
Asweddumized
As designated rice-editor at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, this clipping from The Nation, a Sri Lankan newspaper, landed on my desk. But I am not sure what to make of it.
Researchers (or farmers?) have discovered a (new?) type of rice that can be vegetatively propagated:
The long Mavee rice plant can be cut in pieces and sown to grow as any normal rice. It took the researchers nearly six years to find the specific qualities in the Mavee cultivation, and those plants that contained this quality were later named as Maha Mavee.
Mavee is a variety, maha means wet season (as opposed to yala, the dry season). And as it grows up to “10 feet during flash floods” (that’s quick!) I suppose it is a ‘deep-water’ or ‘floating’ rice type.
So what? Well, the newspaper calls them miracle plants. According to “attorney-at-law and a renowned environmentalist,” Jagath Gunawardane, this is a big deal:
The discovery of this new method of vegetative propagation is likely to revolutionise the entire industry. The Government now needs to help the farmers maintain this cultivation technique, and also prevent companies from claiming patent rights for this ground breaking breakthrough in the agricultural field.
Presumably because of savings in seed cost. Interesting. But then again there are four or five “miracle rices” discovered every year…
To briefly go off on a tangent in an area that I am not a total dummy about, I recently learned the word “asweddumized.” I came across it in the (English language) agricultural statistics of Sri Lanka. I was told that the word was first introduced in 1958 by S.W.R.D. Bandaranayaike, then the Sri Lankan Prime Minister. It stems from the Sinhala word “aswaddanawa,†meaning converting forest land into cultivatable land that has bunds for retaining either irrigation or rainwater, mainly for rice.
But back to the subject at hand. What do you think the prospects are for Maha Mavee? Are there examples of normally seed propagated crops that become vegetatively propagated? Fruit trees through grafting is one example, but that is for a different reason: the propagation of a particular genotype, rather than saving seeds.
People have tried the opposite with potatoes. It seems obvious: ‘true’ (botanical) potato seed is much cheaper than seed tubers, carries fewer diseases, can be stored, etc. But this has not been very successful. Potato was too variable from seed (which makes it so much fun to try this at home), as quality (uniformity and size) is important in the market, and yields were lower. The International Potato Center (CIP) has worked on these issues, and Hubert Zandstra (a former director of CIP) remains optimistic about these seeds, and particularly about their benefits to poor farmers. He thinks that early ‘bulking’ (the formation of tubers) and apomixis may save the day for true potato seed.