Category: Markets

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Following threats to animals along supply chains

As Rio +20 looms ever nearer, everyone is scrambling to put stuff out pushing their particular agenda, taking care to note that they’re not suggesting that their agenda is any less vital than anyone else’s agenda, of course, and that in any case There Are No Silver Bullets. One of the more interesting products released to coincide with next week’s Brazilian festivities is an interactive map which uses “a new global trade database to follow the products implicated in species threats right through to the final consumers.”

The paper describing the methodology is in Nature.

We linked 25,000 Animalia species threat records from the IUCN Red List of endangered species to over 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries. We then used the trade database to evaluate over 5 billion supply chains in terms of their biodiversity impacts.

It’s a massive undertaking, and it may be churlish to wonders why it’s not easier to export the maps it enables one to produce. So I won’t, and merely confine myself to hoping that a plant version will be available soon. Oh, and maybe also one in which agriculture is not seen only as the bad guy. In fact, would it not be nice to have the other side of the coin? That is, a map showing where supply chains may actually be contributing to conservation. Come on, there must be a few examples of that! Bird-friendly coffee, anyone?

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Nibble: South Sudan seed fair, Seed cinema, Dandelion diversity, Nature’s value graphic, Cocaine synthesis, Livestock farming, Visualizing conservation trade-offs, Vertical farms, Sequence fungi

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Nibbles: SusAg, Buffalo beef, SAVE Newsletter, Northern seeds

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The Food Programme and some of its meta-narratives

I’ve been catching up on the BBC’s Food Programme by way of its handy podcasts, and, amid a certain amount of fare that, it must be said, can perhaps most charitably be described as filling, there have been some undoubted gourmet morsels. 1 I was particularly struck by how, for chocolate, beer and gin (and others, for all I know), the past few years have seen an explosion of small manufacturers and tiny niche products, especially in the US. That famous Long Tail at work, I guess. The other common thread is an increase in consumption of such relative luxury goods in the developing world. Quite a combination, but what’s not clear to me is the kind of dent the financial crisis has put into these trends. Nor, of rather more direct interest, do I know the exact geographic location where one might expect to benefit maximally from them. But I suspect the masher-uppers are working on that.