- Botany Photo of the Day is an onion wild relative! Pretty.
- More on that livestock-can-help-reduce-desertification thing, this time from Scientific American.
- Breeding Striga-resistant sorghum. Whatever it takes to protect local beer, boffin-dudes!
- Emmer wheat reviewed to bits.
- No passport data for your barley? Fear not.
- Rachel Laudan ably defends Hawaiian food.
- Origins of almond traced to Iran. Not for the first time.
- Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: A Commons Perspective. Presentation from our friends at FAO.
- Presentation on the untapped potential of cassava in the Great Lakes region of Africa. One of many from CIAT lately. Check out their stuff on beans too.
- The Seed Cathedral of Shanghai. Thanks to those public awareness wizards at Kew.
- Big shindig on biofortification. Be there, or be malnourished.
- Times of India bangs the drum for nutritious millets.
- Yet more loveliness from serious amateur pea breeder Rebsie Fairholm.
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.
How many plants feed the world?
A first (of many, we hope) guest post from our friend and colleague Colin Khoury.
In the field of conservation of plant genetic resources, it is commonly stated that a very limited number of plant species feed the world. ((Ah, those meta-narratives! Ed.)) A number of publications, especially in the 1970’s and 1980’s, provided different angles on how many crops or species provide just how much of the human diet. And there are a lot of ways to try to answer the question. Most of the publications end up with numbers around 7, or 15, or 20, or 30 crops that feed the world. Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen (1990) found global aggregate statistical data unsatisfactory in telling the full story for peoples of all countries:
Crops such as fonio, Digitaria exilis Stapf, and quinoa, Chenopodium quinoa Willd., are lost in global production data; but to conclude that they are unimportant is to conclude that the people of Guinea, Gambia, and Bolivia who rely on them are unimportant.
Instead, they worked with national level Food Balance Sheets from FAO, and looked at the question in four ways to determine just how many species make up 90% of the total intake of food weight, calories, protein and fat in each country.
The result is “85 species commodities and 28 general commodities contribute 90% of national per capita supplies of food plants.” After a bit of tinkering, they come up with this final statement: “the total number of species commodities is 82. These consist of 103 species. Fifty-six of the species commodities, consisting of 75 species, account for 5% or more of the national supply of a nutritional category in at least one country.”
Still confused? Well, it’s a difficult question to answer. And answers are often underestimates, as statistical data rarely account well for local markets, home production, etc. Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen provide some interesting food for thought ((As it were. Ed.)) in working with statistics at the national level, and in doing so perhaps include more species/crops than studies working with global aggregate data.
Has much changed since 1990? A full re-run of their analysis, country by country, is still to be done. But what happens when we aggregate the country statistics from the latest Food Balance Sheets (2007)? Again including the four categories (weight, calories, protein, fat), and counting those crops and food products that comprise 90% of the diet, we find that about 25 crops/species, plus about 7 general commodities, do the job (not listed in any particular order of importance):
Apples
Bananas/ Plantains
Beans
Barley
Cassava
Coconut
Cottonseed
Grapes
Groundnuts
Maize
Millet
Olive Oil
Onions
Oranges, Mandarines
Palm Oil
Potatoes
Rape and Mustard Oil
Rice (Milled Equivalent)
Sorghum
Soyabeans
Sugar Cane
Sunflowerseed Oil
Sweet Potatoes
Tomatoes
Wheat
Beverages, Alcoholic
Beverages, Fermented
Fruits, Other
Oilcrops Oil, Other
Pulses, Other
Sweeteners, Other
Vegetables, Other
A further note, if the alcoholic beverages happened to have caught your eye: ((Don’t look at me. Ed.))
Average alcohol consumption (= beer + beverages, alcoholic + wine + beverages, fermented) = 70 kcal/cap/day = 3% total calories from plant sources. Alcohol consumption is much higher in some countries, such as the Czech Republic: 282 kcal/cap/day, or 11.9% of total calories from plant foods.
Here’s the top 10 countries in providing calories from alcohol: Luxembourg, Ireland, Estonia, Czech Republic, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary. No surprises there.
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?
Society for Economic Botany discussing agrobiodiversity as we speak
Coming across this write-up of a year-old symposium on Mexico’s wild and cultivated greens reminded me that this year’s congress of the Society for Economic Botany is going on right now in Xalapa, Mexico. The theme is “Agrobiodiversity, lessons for conservation and local development.” If you’re there (and we know you are) and would like to report on the meeting for us (and we know you do), just drop us a line.