- Cambridge University summarizes the 10,000-year journey “from foraging to farming”.
- A journey that’s still taking place at the Kuk Early Agricultural World Heritage Site in Papua New Guinea.
- Where researchers are working with farmers to see which vegetables grow best where.
- Tonka beans (Dipteryx odorata) are the foundation of a conservation programme in Venezuela.
- Bio-villages in Bangladesh, “to improve food security and increase the supply of nutritionally rich food”. Supported by IRRI!
Mufhoho for the masses, finger millet for the rest of us
The Gaia Foundation recently featured a slideshow about the work of the Mupo Foundation. The slideshow is all about finger millet (Eleusine coracana) in Venda, a region of South Africa. Mupo says it:
[S]trengthens local communities in ecological governance by reviving indigenous seed, facilitating and encouraging intergenerational learning, and rebuilding confidence in the value of indigenous knowledge systems.
That kind of language probably wows donors; I hope so. What it comes down to, though, is helping young people to learn from those who have not yet forgotten about crops that are better for them and their environment. Finger millet certainly fits the bill. The Mupo Foundation is gathering, storing and sharing finger millet diversity, promoting its nutritional value, and preserving rituals and traditions that depend on millet. It would be nice to think that they could be funded under a new call for proposals for research on Improving rural livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa: Sustainable and climate-smart intensification of agricultural production. Maybe even trialling some of the 5957 varieties that ICRISAT says it has in its genebank, to see whether any can deliver additional benefits under changing climate regimes.
Nibbles: Cannabaceae revisited, Farmer information, Sunflower genes, Urban foraging, Plant hunters, Forest gardens
- Hoping and doping: taxonomy of hops revised.
- What do farmers want? Where do they look for it? How much will they pay? IFPRI has answers.
- Van Gogh’s sunflower mutants explained.
- Gathering in the city: an annotated bibliography and review of the literature about human-plant interactions in urban ecosystems.
- Career advice: Plant Hunters.
- Coffee forest gardens improve food security.
Nibbles: Mopani, Svalbard, Chestnut blight, West African eats, Megareport, Fungi, Smallanthus, Innovation, MSB video, Pacific bananas
- No more mopani worms in Zimbabwe. Luigi distraught.
- More tosh on Svalbard. Nobody distraught.
- Chestnut blight threatens UK chestnuts. Castanophiles distraught.
- The oily charms of West African cuisine. Did someone say “oily”?
- Another big panel of the great and the good has issued a deafening report; Gordon Conway, panellist, tells us “How to create resilient agriculture“.
- DFID fertilises Vietnamese mushroom farms. Kept in the dark and fed manure?
- Yacon spotted in Malaysia. Just ask for snow lotus fruit.
- The World Bank has published a Sourcebook on Agricultural Innovation. So can we all go home now?
- Step inside the Millennium Seed Bank. A video.
- ProMusa disentangles Pacific bananas, the better to conserve them.
A diversity of nibbles
Got held up with sickness and overwork, so rather than nibbling, which takes work, 1 how about a kinda narrative thang?
Starting off with a piece from Agriculture for Impact asking does planting trees compete with planting food?. “It depends,” natch. Richer farmers tend to do well in the particular scheme, which was based on payments for carbon sequestration. The one comment on the post – Planting trees is more profitable than planting food crops – puts in a nutshell the difficulties of improving local food security. Can you buy as much nutrition as you could grow on the same land? Is sequestering carbon considered in the USDA’s new Economic Research Report Rural Wealth Creation: Concepts, Strategies, and Measures? I’ve no idea. Also, on prices and wealth, Marcelino Fuentes calls the do-gooders for their volte-face on high food prices. Surely they’re good for poor farmers? Not any more. and how I remember the squirming when this very topic came up at the FAO in 2008.
In the wake of The Economist’s encomium to Svalbard, the Western Farm Press links that fine safety backup seed bank to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, calling it “the oldest global seed bank”. Pavlovsk is still under threat, which Svalbard presumably is not, so point taken. But c’mon, people, it is not a seed bank.
And speaking of seeds, Garden Organic in the UK has a new guide to exotica, serving the needs of communities new to the English Midlands who want to grow the stuff they’ve always eaten. I’d have thought they already knew how, but maybe the real point is to harvest that knowledge.
All those communities moving around the place have been known to muddy the linguistic waters around the things they eat; your rocket is my arugula, and neither of us knows what rughetta might be. There’s long been an on-again off-again project at Melbourne University, to compile a multilingual, multi script plant name database, which is useful if you have specific questions. Now comes something that might be altogether more provocative of interesting work: on open data standard for food. I’m not geeky enough to know exactly how it will be useful – for example in citizen science, or global surveys – but I am geeky enough to believe that it will indeed be useful.