A press release from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research is creating tiny ripples in the blogosphere because it suggests that fertilizer, rather than water, is what poor farmers in semi-arid regions of Zimbabwe need to improve their crops. That’s certainly one conclusion from the research of Dr Bongani Ncube, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation 10 days ago. (Congratulations, Bongani.) More important, I think, is the demonstration that almost regardless of water, sorghum crops benefit enormously from a preceding grain legume. There’s an interaction with rainfall to be sure. In a dry year, cowpea yields more than groundnut or bambara groundnut, but sorghum is always better after a nitrogen-fixing legume. That’s not to say that farmers shouldn’t make use of a little artificial fertilizer if they can afford it. But a better strategy might be to grow a variety of grain legumes, to buffer any possible effects of rainfall, and then plant sorghum, using agricultural biodiversity instead of cash to increase the harvest.
Local and exotic crops in Africa
The long dry spell throughout much of February and March, caused by an unexpected El Nino that kept the main rain belt to the north of Zimbabwe, will cause serious hardship in significant areas of the country.
That’s not the only thing, of course, but an article from the Harare Herald ((Posted at allAfrica.com)) makes a plea for farmers to grow local indigenous grains such as “sorghum, mhunga and rapoko” rather than watch maize “wilt and die four years out of five”.
It is a wonderful article, making lots of good points. That food-for-work programmes should be accompanied by intensive training on growing small grains, so that those who need it most can become self-reliant in food and maybe even sell a bit for income. That modern machinery makes preparation much easier, and it isn’t expensive. That an advertising campaign could make a virtue of sadza ((Zimbabwean porridge?)) the way grandmothers made it. That there are benefits for urban consumers too. And finally, “Variety is wonderful. But we should not be rejecting indigenous grains simply because they are not “modern” or “Western”. We should be using them as well”.
I wonder whether anyone is listening?
The Ethiopian Herald, meanwhile, says green gram is becoming the crop of choice in Southern Wollo zone. A legume, green gram (Vigna radiata, maybe most familiar in the West as mung bean) improves soil fertility, ripens more rapidly and doubles or even triples incomes. One farmer is quoted as having replaced his teff crop with green gram, but if everybody does that, who is going to supply the teff flour for njera?
Climate change: Diversity the mother of invention?
Our man with the factor 30 sunscreen and the big umbrella writes:
Climate change is the new black. Everyone’s talking about, if you haven’t experienced it, well frankly you haven’t lived. We’ve heard this week that 39% of the world will have novel climates in 2100 (via Eco-Justice Blog). The concept of “novel” climates is a little abstract, but the authors of the study did a good job of bringing attention to the fact that new solutions are needed to adapt to climate change. It’s not always just a question of transferring existing technologies and practices. Without alienating the good people who invited me to write this, I’m afraid that for these areas conventional crop improvement of some of the hardiest crops is perhaps the most rational means of confronting this. (No alienation here: Ed.) Either that or give up on agriculture in these regions and intensify in the less affected regions.
But the study leaves 61% of climates where change is predicted, but to a climate already found currently on the earth. That’s a calming thought, as long as of course we have faith in the conventional climate models and hope the doomsday scenarios don’t come true. This opens up a world of opportunities for agricultural biodiversity, where an eternal optimist like me could even think something good might come of it. After all, adversity is the mother of invention. Perhaps the building blocks for agriculture adapted to the Brazilian cerrados will come from landraces used by farmers from the Sahel belt in Niger.
What do we need to do?
We need to get out of the abstract paradigm that we’ve constructed of ex situ collections, leading to crop breeding of blanket solutions, followed by a less than optimal delivery of new seed technologies. Farmers have exchanged seeds informally for millennia, and the rich diversity of landraces is testament to the fact that this works, especially in the face of change. We need to go back a hundred years, and direct all our 21st century advances in international diplomacy and treaties, communication technologies and truly use our ex situ collections to redeploy diversity and stimulate a diversification of agricultural systems.
Why? Well for starters studies point to climate change impacts being highly localized. To over-simplify, deploying a new seed technology across an entire region would result in improved adaptation for some, but a failure to capitalize on an opportunity for others. Of course, that’s the flip side of diversity: how to avoid sub-optimal use of diversity? How can we help a farmer to use the most adapted seed, maximizing the opportunity without being over-exposed to risk? Plenty of valid research questions.
Of course, we need to do a lot more and diversity is unfortunately not capable of confronting climate change alone. But I’m interested to hear ideas of how we might operationalise the redeployment of agrobiodiversity, especially in marginal areas.
From Andy Jarvis. If you have ideas, leave a comment.
Technorati Tags: agriculture, climate change
Enset bags
Via Timbuktu Chronichles comes news that a Ugandan company called African Skin has won the Business in Development Challenge. African Skin makes attractive bags and other accessories from the outer layers of fibre of the enset plant (see also here for the role of enset in food security in Ethiopia), which can be sustainably harvested. “The Business in Development (BiD) Challenge is the first international business plan competition for entrepreneurship and development. The BiD Challenge offers entrepreneurs worldwide the opportunity to develop and execute business plans that improve living standards in developing countries at a profit.”
Cool cartograms
Cartograms are maps where the sizes of territories (countries, say) are proportional not to the surface area of their real-world counterparts, but rather to the value of some other attribute, like population or GDP or incidence of malaria. You can see lots of really wonderful examples on the Worldmapper website. That includes a few agricultural variables and some forestry stuff. Here’s an example of the former, net imports of vegetables by $ value.
As I said earlier in connection with Gapminder, wouldn’t it be great to be able to produce cartograms from FAOSTAT data? Or what about from the data in SINGER? Well actually that shouldn’t be all that difficult, the code for making your own cartograms is available, according to Worldmapper’s FAQ. Any volunteers?
Cartogram © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan), reproduced by permission. Worldmapper is at: www.worldmapper.org