- Sunberry. Taste-free! Toxin-loaded?
- CGIAR needs to do more “crop genetic improvement” for greater impact. Yeah, right.
- Heavy hitters to brief US Congress on Climate Change and Agriculture, June 16.
- Management more important than agricultural biodiversity in delivering ecosystem services? Say it isn’t so!
- Sorghum beer a big hit with England soccer fans.
- Turkeys domesticated for their feathers? This I gotta see.
- (Irish) public understanding of biodiversity.
Nibbles: Hemp, Wheat, Wheat, Conservation, Liberia, Carnival, Climate change, Satoyama, Leafy greens
- The National Cannabis Collection in Hungary. Undated. Popped up. What can I tell you?
- CIMMYT’s wheat atlas. Still in beta. What can I tell you?
- And here’s a primer on spring vs winter wheat.
- Director of European Crop Protection Association equates biodiversity with wildlife. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
- Liberian President Sirleaf: “Agricultural growth is more effective in reducing poverty than any effort in any other sector.” h/t NtP.
- New edition of Scientia pro Publica blog carnival.
- Our friend Ehsan’s Seeds for Needs project launches in Papua New Guinea, beating climate change to the punch.
- The Satoyama Initiative has a website. And RSS feed.
- “…traditional food crops … are an important source of community resilience in Zimbabwe—including resilience to climate change and economic turbulence.”
Watching TV in the Kolli Hills
More from India’s Kolli Hills and the efforts to reinvigorate millet cultivation there. A recent paper by anthropologist Elizabeth Finnis of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada is described in PLEC Digest. The paper is intriguingly titled “Now it is an easy life” ((E. Finnis 2009. “Now it is an easy life”: women’s accounts of cassava, millet and labor in South India. Culture and Agriculture 31(2): 88-94.)) and the editors at PLEC take this one step further by calling their post “So I can watch TV.”
The point is that there is a very good reason why millets are much less grown than formerly, despite cultural attachment, better nutritional composition and a much-preferred taste. They are a bother to prepare.
Rice has replaced millet as the main staple, freeing the women of a major and onerous morning job. Other income from cassava, and from work outside the local community, is used to vary the diet, pay for children’s education, and buy other commodities. These include bicycles and, for a minority as yet, prestigious goods such as TV sets and motor cycles. There is more time for social activity, and, as one young woman put it, there are more “times when we are free. So I can watch TV” (p.91).
So what to do? Apart from collecting the millets and storing them away in a genebank, that is. The author of the PLEC piece — though not Finnis — does refer to the well-known work of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation:
The project has given considerable attention to marketing issues, and began to provide involved communities with mechanical mills suitable for the dehusking of millet (which has thicker husks than rice) (Gruere et al 2009). However, up to the time of Finnis’ report, these had not reached the part of the Kolli hills in which she worked. In her paper, Finnis does not specifically discuss the Swaminathan project, but suggests that any project involving millet cultivation revival, especially for household use, needs to consider demands on women’s labour, and women’s labour preferences.
Here’s the bottom line:
While irrigation and market improvements could help, it would be reduction of processing time from hours to minutes made possible by mechanical hullers that might achieve most, “allowing women to take advantage of both their preferences for reduced labour loads and for the taste of millets in their everyday diets” (p. 92).
Well that doesn’t sound too difficult to me.
Nibbles: Agricultural landscapes, Seed banks, Maize genetics, Food diversity, Ancient food, Micronutrients status report, Seed systems, Punjab Agricultural University, Arable land, Dutch elm disease
- “Priortizing restoration across agricultural landscapes.” Nothing to do with agriculture, though.
- “Gene banks to rescue local crops.” Nothing to do with genebanks, though.
- “‘Psychedelic’ maize may help increase crop and biofuel yields.” Nothing to do with LSD, though.
- Scotland gets a national genebank. Well, not really, but anyway.
- Malawi schoolchildren sing about food diversity. No, really.
- Homo erectus ate fish as part of a pretty diverse diet. Had to wait about 2 million years for chips.
- Report for 10-Year Strategy for Reduction of Vitamin & Mineral Deficiencies. “…activities to enhance dietary diversification are an attractive option for improving micronutrient status, but these have proved difficult to evaluate.” Ouch.
- “Integrating Genetic Resource Conservation and Sustainable Development into Strategies to Increase the Robustness of Seed Systems.” You’ll need to pay to find out how, though. I’ll try to get a pdf, some of the authors are friends.
- The role of Punjab Agricultural University in the Green Revolution. And in genetic erosion?
- Enough arable land to feed world, says new French study. But not here, say Indians.
- Reviving the elm in Britain one sapling at a time. How long till the next disaster, though, with such a narrow genetic base?
Nibbles: Eggplant history, Weaver heirlooms, Emu farming, India’s cropland, Togo maize storage
- Where does the eggplant come from? Where is it going?
- William Woys Weaver and his heirloom seed collection.
- Orissa farmers try emus. In desperation, presumably.
- India runs out of cropland.
- Tweaking Togo’s traditional grain storage structures.