Category: Mainstream

Posted on

The Economist on investing in adapting agriculture

A much wider range of adaptations will be needed if food is to remain as copious, varied and affordable as it is today. These will include efforts to help crops withstand warmer temperatures, for example through clever crop breeding, advances in irrigation and protection against severe weather. Rich and poor countries alike should also make it a priority to reduce the amount of food that is wasted (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation guesses that more than one-third is squandered). The alternative will be a world that is hungrier and more unequal than it is at present—and than it might have been.

That’s from The Economist‘s analysis last week of projected shifts in the distribution of crops around the world as a result of climate change. Needless to say, genetic diversity will be needed to do all those good things. Investors read The Economist, right?

Posted on

Investing in biodiversity

What do investors think of biodiversity? Well, a new report from Credit Suisse and Responsible Investor says that they’re increasingly interested, but that they are not (yet) putting their money where their mouths are. The reason?

Investors are struggling to identify and consider biodiversity-linked investment opportunities. Biodiversity needs to be made more digestible and measurable for investor concerns to translate into investment action…

More digestible? Now there’s an opportunity for agricultural biodiversity at least.

The challenge of protecting wildlife and nature has fallen behind many other sustainability issues for investors and governments alike. Part of the explanation likely lies in the complexity of biodiversity and its loss. “Diversity is the opposite of investors’ desire for standardisation and comparability of things,” says Piet Klop, Senior Advisor Responsible Investment, PGGM. “Biodiversity is challenging because it really is the anti-commodity.”

Ah yes, functioning ecosystems and food as anti-commodities. Can we not muster some decent arguments against this pernicious view?

Posted on

Nibbles: Apple diversity, Quinoa diversity, Potato diversity, Indian coconut, Mead recipe

  1. The need to diversify apple breeding.
  2. Unlikely pean to the world quinoa core collection. I believe we may have blogged about it.
  3. And the Commonwealth Potato Collection rounds off today’s trifecta of cool genebanks.
  4. Kerala’s coconut problems only start with root wilt. Aren’t there coconut collections that could be used to solve them? Well of course there are.
  5. Recreating bochet, a medieval mead, sounds really hard, but worth it. Someone want to start a mead collection?