- Golden Rice better than kitchen gardens? We just don’t have the data. But why is that?
- Brazil and China compete for African agriculture. Are either of them at this African food security conference? Meanwhile, Australia vs China in the Pacific. Are either of them contributing to this ecosystem management survey? Oh, what could possibly go wrong?
- The “beauty” of mycorrhiza. And more cool fungi.
- World Bank says it is possible to measure nutritional outcomes in children without breaking the bank.
- It wasn’t just ancient farmers who kept pigs.
- CIP uses GIS shock.
- Darwin’s abominable mystery sorted out. Oh, and cereal vernalization to boot.
- Nabhan: The U.S. government should direct more money to the country’s “underfinanced seed collection and distribution programs.”
The further deconstruction of Indian onion prices
A quick follow-up to our post a couple of days back on the price of onions in India. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal, no less, weighed in on the subject, with a reference to a report commissioned by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to get to the bottom of…
…volatility of onion prices and its relationship with distribution in the what the CCI described as a “loose and casual market.”
According to one of the authors, quoted by the WSJ:
There is almost an oligopoly kind of situation and until there are multiple players, the price will be dictated by a few traders.
So it’s all down to those pesky middlemen, it seems. Farmers have no chance:
Farmers generally take reference of the local markets’ rates, while traders compare rates of all markets, including major distant and export markets and then decide where to send their produce
Ah, but wait. There’s also news of a World Bank pilot project to crowdsource price data on agricultural commodities which may solve that little problem. Here’s the onion data from last year. 1 I’m not sure whether in due course we’ll also have this year’s, and thus be able to see that 200% year-on-year increase in July mentioned by the WSJ.
I guess the real challenge is to get these numbers out in real time, and in a way that farmers can make use of. There’s clearly a way to go:
What did we learn? The results from the pilot tell us that, yes, the crowd can collect reliable and timely prices – but you need to provide incentives and implement good verification and validation processes. The resulting data are comparable over time and space, and timeliness is pretty good — the time lag is only about a month. And, importantly, the resulting data are open to all users.
A good start, no doubt, but I’m not sure that a month after the event is going to be of much use to farmers. Other similar efforts are underway, though, so maybe one of these “thousand points of light” will emerge as a bit brighter than the others. After all, if weather, why not prices?
Why is this important for agricultural biodiversity? Well, for a start, markets have been touted as the saviours of neglected and underutilized crops, and maybe even landraces of the more successful and overused sort. Wouldn’t do if they were “loose and casual”, now would it?
Meanwhile, can we have the same for fish?
Nibbles: Citrus cryo, Vegetables everywhere, Threatened ecosystems, Brazilian ag, Native restoration, Regeneration video, Nomenclature, Grass pea, Tef, Millet, Hops, Kenyan rabbits, Bloody quinoa
- Saving citrus by freezing it.
- WorldVeg pushing tomatoes in the Solomons. New York next? Ah, but what they really need is Mind Gardens. Oh, and a how-to-save-seeds book. Or maybe just Jeremy’s latest podcast on breeding your own veggies.
- Ecosystems get their red list too.
- “Although there are some who consider Brazilian agriculture to be aggressive and destructive, we want to share another vision for the rest of the tropical belt…”
- But if it’s too late, of course you can try to restore them.
- Video of wheat regeneration in Canada. Like watching grass grow. No, wait.
- The naming of plants, music to our ears.
- Kew does Lathyrus sativus, grass pea to the rest of you, music to Luigi’s ears.
- IFPRI is going great nutritional guns, with the low-down on tef and biofortified millet.
- So, Big Picture Agriculture’s hop garden is flourishing.
- Likewise rabbits in Kenya.
- Enough already with the quinoa.
Brainfood: Touristic islands, Pearl millet diversity, Barley diversity, Maize diversity, Weird chickpea, Sweet potato diversity, Pawpaw diversity, Grewia domestication, Agrobiodiversity is the key, Sunflower relative dynamics
Sorry about the Brainfood hiatus lately. Back now, and with a vengeance.
- Plant genetic resources in a touristic island: the case of Lefkada (Ionian Islands, Greece). Landraces and tourism can coexist.
- Assessment of genetic diversity among pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R Br.] cultivars using SSR markers. The cultivars coming out of a given breeding programme cluster together. No!
- Population genetic structure in a social landscape: barley in a traditional Ethiopian agricultural system. Farmer management trumps even altitude.
- Environmental and social factors account for Mexican maize richness and distribution: A data mining approach. Oh no it doesn’t.
- Identification of an upright peduncle and podding genotype in chickpea germplasm conserved in the National Genebank. That’s one out of 18,873.
- Molecular, morphological and agronomic characterization of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) germplasm collection from Mozambique: Genotype selection for drought prone regions. 6 out of 28 local genotypes are drought tolerant. No word on whether they’re yellow fleshed too.
- Genotyping a large collection of pepper (Capsicum spp.) with SSR loci brings new evidence for the wild origin of cultivated C. annuum and the structuring of genetic diversity by human selection of cultivar types. The taxonomy is ok. Human selection is reflected by genetic diversity. A quarter of the accessions can be chosen which contain 97% of the genetic diversity. In other news, France has a collection of 1,300 peppers.
- Phenotypic and Genetic Diversity of Papaya. Wild papayas from South America are closer to an allied genus than to the cultigen.
- Grewia flavescens: a potential horticultural crop? Well, maybe.
- Agricultural biodiversity as a link between traditional food systems and contemporary development, social integrity and ecological health. You need sustainable small farms tied into global markets for high value food crops and ecosystem services. Marx rolls over in his grave.
- Proximity to agriculture alters abundance and community composition of wild sunflower mutualists and antagonists. Wild relative populations nearer to cultigen have more pollinators but fewer seed and leaf munchers than those further away. Not entirely sure what that means for in situ conservation, but I’m sure it’s something.
Knowing your (Indian) onions
I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the current precarious state of the Indian economy, but there are quite a few stories doing the rounds on the high prices of agricultural commodities in that country. Just today there were pieces on onions and on guar, which is the legume Cyamopsis tetragonoloba, whose gum has a role in fracking. But this onions business is nothing new. I am sure I remember similar panics in past years, and not just in 2011, which is the only search peak Google reveals:
Anyway, just for the hell of it, I waded into FAOSTAT’s onion price data for India and a couple of neighbouring countries, and this is what I got:
Some fluctuations, yes, but not much evidence or price spikes, surely. But why all that missing data from India (the red line)? Let the conspiracy theorizing begin!