The philosophy behind the One Acre Fund is clearly of a piece with that of the Millennium Villages and the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme: giving farmers seeds, fertilizers, some advice and a market outlet will do wonders for livelihoods. In a way, it’s a no-brainer: of course it will! And it seems churlish and petty and ungenerous to add the canonical “at least for a while” qualifier, and bring up sustainability and resilience and suchlike when lives are at stake, the need urgent, and the amounts of money involved relatively small. So I won’t go down that route. But I will point out, and not for the first time, that if you are going to do something like this, or this, please first have a look at the amount and uniqueness of the agrobiodiversity you may end up displacing. And I’ll also repeat, again not for the first time, that such initiatives are why we need a global early warning system for genetic erosion. It’s easy to start. All we need is a participatory online mapping platform. You can even submit data via SMS these days!
Nibbles: New York, Kenya, London
- Restoring grasslands on Long Island. I know, not very agrobiodiversity, but it brought back memories.
- “Children long for Coca-Cola, though, far more than they do mursik, and for them food means maize and potatoes, not millet or sorghum.” This brought back memories too, and is about agrobiodiversity to boot.
- Urban winemaking in London. And yes, memories here too.
Nibbles: Sheep, Syrup, Antioxidants, Urban flora, Politics, Erosion, Prince, India and climate change
- British hill sheep in trouble.
- Canadian maple syrup in trouble.
- Fruits good for you.
- Native urban plants in trouble. How many crop wild relatives among them?
- “If the world learned to feed itself half a century ago, why are there now more hungry people than ever before?” Er … I dunno. Either-orism?
- “Almost all of the 300 experts at a two-day food forum in Rome this week agreed that between them they had all the answers to how to feed the world in 2050, but doubted they would have the political support to do it.” Alert the media!
- “Erosion of Crop Diversity Worrying“. Malawian plant breeder speaks.
- British wildflowers in trouble, prince says? How many crop wild relatives among them? Does prince know? Care?
- Indian crops in trouble.
Nibbles: Markets, Easter Island, Honey, Coffee, Cowpea, Morocco, Urban Ag, Kenya
- I love pictures of agrobiodiversity in markets.
- Humans did for trees on Rapa Nui after all, not rats.
- Like refining chocolate, extracting honey is a fragrant, messy process. Bring it on.
- Fair Trade coffee unfair to farmers, CIAT says.
- Another day, another genome. This time it’s cowpea.
- 2000 year old food forest in Morocco. Honestly! And guess what? It’s not thriving.
- Another video (long). Education of an Urban Farmer.
- Education of an ex-pastoralist farmer, Karamojong, Kenya
Nibbles: Teaching vegetables, Truffles, Freakonomics of farmer markets, Crops used for art, Seed storage, Organic farming in Spain, 2050
- Pamela Akinyi Nyagilo wins prize for teaching Kenyan kids to grow indigenous greens. In 2007, but better late with the news than never.
- The Great War did for truffles?
- “Does a local food system truly enhance the integrity of a community, much less make the peasant the equal of a prince and eliminate greed?” And more. And more. And more. And…
- Crop art, and more. And more.
- Brassica seeds survive 40 years in a genebank with no loss of viability. Phew.
- “It seems that, while discount and low-end retailers face more difficulties selling organic products, specialised organic shops and high-end retailers continue to develop beyond expectations.”
- “As Andy Jarvis, an award-winning crop scientist, puts it: ‘When you look at the graph, under even small average heat rises, the line for maize just goes straight down.’ “