- From SRI to SARI. Rice has never had it so good.
- Look there’s even a guy in Orisha who grows 920 varieties.
- Biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction: Unproven. Doesn’t sound like they looked at agricultural biodiversity though.
- Contrary take on the Borlaug legacy.
- From Map Your Recipe to Compare Your Recipe. h/t Rachel Laudan.
- Follow that biofortification conference in Kigali. Maybe they’ll talk about recipes.
- Guardian Environment blogger breaks down the agricultural bits of the IPCC report for you. Lots of that going around.
- No conceivable reason for growing jatropha in Kenya. One of those times when you wonder whether anyone had predicted this would happen at the time.
- So does anyone know now whether switching from coffee to banana might be a bad idea in the long run? This is your chance.
- Wild chickpea to the rescue.
- The ups and downs of groundnut research in Africa.
- Islamic insurance for herders. Demand, meet supply.
- Celtic fields can still be seen, if you know what to look for.
- Seed fair in Senegal exchanges pearl millet. Could usefully do the same in Namibia, it looks like.
- Does economic growth help in reducing child malnutrition? It depends on whether you plot % malnutrition against GDP per capita or annual change of the first against annual change in the latter.
- The complicated story of yeast, unravelled.
Agricultural biodiversity where you least expect it
Continuing our in-depth treatment of The Economist’s (unwitting?) coverage of agricultural biodiversity, two items in the most recent issue. First, consider this photo:
It’s from an article on the BBC World Service, and clearly shows the value of a radio in Africa. But what’s that the listener is holding? Could it be a cavy? I rather think it could, and of course one wouldn’t expect The Economist to mention its origins in the Andes. We, however, still want to know when they arrived, how they got there, and whether they are proving the “indispensable” option they were thought to be.
Then there’s this little table, from an article on price fixing and cartels.
See those innocuous little entries for F. Hoffman-La Roche, labelled Vitamins? Those reflect decisions more than a decade ago by the US and the EU to fine not just Hoffman but a bunch of other pharmaceutical companies for fixing the price of vitamin A supplements, proof enough of the economic value of treating vitamin A deficiency as a simple medical problem requiring a simple (and expensive) medical fix. And most of the time, synthetic supplements aren’t even that useful to the children who get them. How else might you improve vitamin A levels? Well, you could try promoting a more diverse diet. But where’s the profit in that?
p.s. I was slightly saddened to see that while Hoffman remains joint number 1 in the EU, it has slipped to a poor 5th in the US. So I ran the numbers through an inflation indexer, which brings the $500 million up to $705 million in today’s dollars, which at least bumps them up a place.
Nibbles: GMO debate, IPCC report, SPC ag strategy, Teff, Biofortification conference, Urban protected areas, Costa Rican ecosystems
- Our Nature Comment genebank paper used to both denigrate and promote GMOs. Must be doing something right.
- Same thing likely to happen with Fifth Assessment Report?
- SPC’s Land Resources Division new strategic plan. Good to see an important role for the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees.
- The future of teff. Two sides to every story. But does it feature in your breakfast?
- Biofortification conference off the ground.
- Urban protected areas: I wonder how many crop wild relatives are involved.
- Costa Rican ecosystems in trouble: I wonder how many crop wild relatives are involved.
Nibbles: Globalized diets edition
- Another one of those fun photoessays on diets around the world. Don’t look too globalized to me.
- Sometimes it’s not such a bad idea for a food to quietly slip away. Take kimchi. Please. The upside of globalization?
- Indian street food is totally immune to globalization, far as I can tell.
- Speaking of globalization, the rise in meat consumption in China is having an effect all over. But the answers are out there… Though some are cooler than others.
- Want to document globalization? You’ll need this incredible resource on the history of the trade in commodities.
- If we all ever eat more seaweed, Zanzibar will make a killing.
- Kew in trouble? One of the great engines of globalization of plant commodities, of course. Surely too big to fail.
- The health effects of diet globalization, you ask? Biofortification conference gearing up in Kigali. Will they listen to alternatives? Any of our readers going, and willing to tell us?
- Is kale making a comeback? Great picture of leaf variation. Among other things.
- I think all these drones could be used to map all those minor, neglected crops, don’t you?
So how many crops feed the world anyway?
I am conscious of the fact that in my recent short post on the paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security” I did not actually provide the answer to the question that the lead author, Colin Khoury, asked four years back on this blog, when he began thinking about doing the study. And that is: How many plants feed the world?
Well, of course, almost 25 years ago Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen (1990) said that “85 species commodities and 28 general commodities contribute 90% of national per capita supplies of food plants.” Because of changes in the way agricultural statistics are recorded, it’s difficult to make exact comparisons, but here’s the money quote summarising the changes:
The total number of important crop species we identified remained relatively consistent in comparison with a previous point estimate based on national-level data from 1979 to 1981 (Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen, 1990), but the spread and abundance values of these crops have changed measurably. The rate of movement toward homogeneity in food supply compositions globally continues with no indication of slowing. This trend implies a likely deterioration in importance of unreported minor and geographically restricted food plants, along with the measured cereal, oil, starchy root, and other crops that displayed significant declines in abundance in national food supplies. Thus, even as the number of measured crops available to the consumer in a given country has increased over the past half-century as a global trend, the total diversity of crops contributing significantly worldwide has narrowed.
So, if you must know, it’s about 94 plant species that largely feed the world. To be more precise, according to the analysis of Colin and his colleagues, we can now say that 50 crops, or 94 species, contribute to 90% of food supplies at national level. If you want to know what they are, you’ll need Table S1 in the paper. Because FAOStat, which is the dataset which both Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen (1990) and this paper uses (and for which, therefore, despite all its faults, we should all be grateful) records only a particular set of (52) relatively big crops, it’s not easy to know what’s happening with consumption of other, more local crops. We do know from many local studies that a lot of them are declining in both cultivation and consumption. But also that something can be done about it. Look at quinoa. History is not destiny. So maybe 95 species feed you if you’re Bolivian or a hipster. And Henry Hargreaves and Caitlin Levin need to re-think their food maps.