Fatter livestock, more wild animals, honey. The elusive win-win-win?
Africa got milk
Carlos Seré, the Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute, said, at a recent meeting on how improved livestock breeding can help alleviate poverty, that high world milk prices are a great opportunity for small-scale producers in Africa. Normally that kind of thing would just make me yawn. But my mother-in-law is one such small-scale producer, so I read the copious material provided by the ILRI public awareness people with interest.
“In Kenya, for example, the familiar black-and-white Holstein dairy cow is a status symbol among smallholders, who want to own this high-milk-producing exotic animal,†Seré said. “Smart and sustainable breeding strategies that conserve local breeds can bring about higher smallholder milk production.â€
I can personally vouch for that. There was talk at the conference about coming up with better adapted breeds:
We need higher-producing cross-breeds for the high-potential areas as well as hardier cross-breeds for less-favourable agricultural areas, particularly Kenya’s vast drylands where water, feed and veterinary services are scarce.
And also about the marketing side:
Over the last decade, scientists at ILRI’s Nairobi-headquarters have worked with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), the Kenyan Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development, and civil society groups to help transform the country’s 39,000 informal ‘raw’ milk sellers into legitimate milk marketers.
All well and good. But I know what my mother-in-law’s main problem is with her milk. She can’t get it down to the cooperative for processing quickly, cheaply and reliably enough on those terrible roads up in the Limuru highlands, especially during the rains. Anybody doing anything about that?
Free the grape!
I blogged a few weeks back about the shift in the approach being taken in Europe to protect traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization. Rather that erecting subsidies and tariffs to compete on price, the idea is to move upmarket and sell expensive niche products to rich foreigners. Of course, that requires a quality control and labelling system, such as appellations of origin (aka geographical indications).
Well, there’s a downside to such systems. I was idly going through my feed reader today and I ran across an old post on The Fruit Blog (a great blog which unfortunately seems to have gone dormant of late) which pointed to a 2004 article in the International Herald Tribune about how legislation is being used in Europe to basically outlaw some old American grapevine varieties:
The story has been all but forgotten in France today except among a handful of wine experts and a gaggle of bureaucrats who enforce the law. The French government banned wine made from American grape varieties on the grounds that it tasted like raspberries and was thus offensive to the palate. The European Commission adopted the French rule in 1979, making it illegal to grow these varieties anywhere in the European Union.
The percentage of outlawed American grape varieties is relatively small in France. But the offending vines are also sprinkled widely throughout several East and Central European countries that have recently joined or will soon join the European Union.
“You can’t tell the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians to uproot their vines,” says Pierre Galet, perhaps the world’s leading expert on grape varieties. He believes the ban on American varieties is anachronistic.
Shades of what Jeremy has called Europe’s draconian seed laws. The US, in contrast, is not shy about mixing up the American and European grapevine genepools (I have blogged about this before: funny how much I write about wine).
As I say, the IHT article is a few years old, and things may have changed. Something is afoot in the EU with regards to wine legislation, but I wasn’t able to find any more recent analysis of the specific issue of the old American varieties. If you know the latest Brussels scoop on this, let us know.
Hot news from CAPRi
No, that’s not a typo. CAPRi is the CGIAR system-wide program on Collective Action and Property Rights. A little more than a year ago CAPRi organized a workshop on Collective Action and Market Access for Smallholders. Now the papers from that meeting are available online. Two that might be of particular interest to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog readers are:
CAPRi Working Paper No. 69: Collective Action and Marketing of Underutilized Plant Species: The Case of Minor Millets in Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu, India, by Guillaume P. Gruère, Latha Nagarajan, and E.D.I. Oliver King
and
CAPRi Working Paper No. 70: The Role of Public-Private Partnerships and Collective Action in Ensuring Smallholder Participation in High Value Fruit and Vegetable Supply Chains, by Clare Narrod, Devesh Roy, Julius Okello, Belem Avendaño, Karl Rich
Agriculture important, World Bank discovers
The World Bank is suddenly all concerned about agriculture. Within a few days there’s the result of an independent evaluation of its assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, and the latest World Development Report, which focuses on agriculture for development. The NY Times has an article on the African report:
At a time of growing debate about how to combat hunger in Africa, the evaluation team recommended that the bank, the single largest donor for African agriculture, concentrate on helping farmers get the basics they need to grow and market more food: fertilizer, seeds, water, credit, roads.
Ah, seeds. If only it were that easy. The World Development Report 2008 actually refers to the spread of improved varieties as “slow magic” (p. 159, chapter 7), pointing out that crop improvement “has been enormously successful, but not everywhere.” Then, on page 259, in a discussion of the “global agenda for the 21st century,” the money quote:
Conserving genetic resources for future food security. Genetic resources and seeds have been the basis for some of the most successful agricultural interventions to promote growth and reduce poverty (chapter 7). Conserving the world’s rich heritage of crop and animal genetic diversity is essential to future global food security. Gene banks and in situ resources that provide fair access to all countries and equitably share the benefits are a global public good that requires global collective action.
Chapter 8, on Making Agricultural Systems more Environmentally Sustainable, should also make for interesting reading.