Running a walnut farm is hard work.
Eat more crap!
It’s a little too preciously written for my taste, but the article at SFGate.com a couple of days back says some sensible things about bugs. Basically, its message is not to be so scared of bacteria on food. They’re agricultural biodiversity too, and can be good for us, essential even. Unfortunately,
the cultural mind-set at large runs directly opposite. So much so that we could be, in effect, cleaning and scrubbing and protecting ourselves to death, as our immune systems whimper and wither and drug-resistant bacteria get nastier and nature always, always finds a way to thwart our silly efforts to eradicate its wild side.
Hence the exhortation in my title, which I’ve nicked from the text of the article. Thanks, Ruthie.
Capsicum on show
“A Pepper for Every Pot†is on at the U.S. Botanic Gardens in Washington, D.C.
War bad for seeds, seeds good for peace
We asked Jacob van Etten to write about war and agricultural biodiversity after seeing his great website. It’s just coincidence that he sent the following piece in right after we blogged about flooding and genetic erosion. Sometimes things work out that way. Thanks, Jacob. We’re always open to guest contributions…
War can be disastrous for the environment. Think about forest destruction in Kurdistan or burning oil wells in Iraq. But we know very little about agrobiodiversity losses caused by armed conflict. Some time ago, a team of geographers wrote an alarming article about maize biodiversity in Guatemala, where a war raged in the 1980s. They claimed that war and modernization had caused a massive disappearance of indigenous maize varieties. This was based on a quick study of several townships.
However, in a recent restudy, which involved more intensive sampling in a single township, it became clear that several maize varieties were still hiding in the corners. Variety loss was in fact rather low and no varieties were reported to be lost due to the war. What seemed to have changed over the last decades was the social distribution of seeds and knowledge, suggestive of a disrupted social exchange network.
As other studies in Rwanda and West Africa have given similar results, a general picture seems to emerge. The problem is often not the physical survival of seeds and varieties during war. They may be conserved by those who stay in the village or recovered after the violence from fields and secret storages. The main problem is that war destroys the social and economic tissue that underpins agricultural diversity management. Mistrust and poverty will limit the circulation of seeds, leading to access problems and a fragmented local knowledge system. There may thus be a lot of sense in a project of CARE by Sierra Leone that turned the problem of seeds and war on its head. It used the distribution of seeds as a way to evoke discussion on the principles of social exclusion and the causes of the armed conflict.
Flooding and genetic erosion
The floods in Tabasco are causing enormous human suffering and extensive damage to crops, homes and infrastructure, but one of their impacts has not been mentioned. Of course, crops in the field have been lost, which is bad enough, but it is likely that farmers’ stores of seed are also gone, as was the case in Bangladesh during recent flooding there. That probably means that farmers in flood-affected areas have lost much of the agricultural biodiversity which they will need to rebuild their livelihoods — and lives. Will they get it back?
Unfortunately, seed relief efforts — focused on the immediate emergency — have sometimes not taken a long-term view of the problem, introducing the wrong varieties in the wrong way, and thus making a sustainable recovery that much harder. In the words of a recent paper commenting on the seed relief effort after Hurricane Mitch: “Providing seed in the wake of a disaster can seem both appropriate and simple. Often, it is neither.” Advice on agrobiodiversity-friendly, sustainable seed relief is available, but whether it is followed or not in Tabasco we shall see. ((See also Richards and Ruivenkamp’s Seeds and Survival for a review of the role of crop genetic resources in reconstruction after wars in Africa.)) In any case, we can probably add some measure of genetic erosion to the horrors the Mexican flooding has wrought.
Later: As chance would have it, the day after I posted the above Eldis summarized a review of seed aid interventions.