Category: Policy

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Whither agriculture?

FAO issued its report The future of food and agriculture: Trends and challenges a couple of months back, but I don’t think we mentioned it at the time, at least not in any detail.

Without a push to invest in and retool food systems, far too many people will still be hungry in 2030 — the year by which the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda has targeted the eradication of chronic food insecurity and malnutrition, the report warns.

I come back to it now because of a useful digest that Ensia has just put out, summarizing the trends analyzed by the report in 12 handy graphs, of which this is perhaps the scariest.

What’s to be done? There’s much talk in the report about “innovative systems that protect and enhance the natural resource base, while increasing productivity” and a “transformative process towards ‘holistic’ approaches, such as agroecology, agro-forestry, climate-smart agriculture and conservation agriculture, which also build upon indigenous and traditional knowledge.” Nothing specifically on conserving crop diversity, however, though I suppose it could be implied in some of the above. There was this, though:

On the path to sustainable development, all countries are interdependent. One of the greatest challenges is achieving coherent, effective national and international governance, with clear development objectives and commitment to achieving them. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development embodies such a vision – one that goes beyond the divide of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. Sustainable development is a universal challenge and the collective responsibility for all countries, requiring fundamental changes in the way all societies produce and consume.

The International Treaty on PGRFA, although also not mentioned by name, is of course predicated on this very interdependence, and coincidentally there was a major development on that last week:

Switzerland proposes that a new paragraph should be added below the current list of crops contained in Annex I. The new paragraph should read as follows:

“In addition to the Food Crops and Forages listed above, and in furtherance of the objectives and scope of the International Treaty, the Multilateral System shall cover all other plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in accordance with Article 3 of the International Treaty.”

Switzerland requests the Secretary of the International Treaty to communicate this submission prior to the next ordinary session of the Governing Body to all Contracting Parties in accordance with Art. 23.2 of the International Treaty.

That should make for an interesting meeting of the Governing Body later this year, and put the talk of “collective responsibility” to the test.

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Brainfood: Dope diversity, Potato chips, Conservation costing, Island breeding systems, Indus civilization cereals, Drone phenotyping, Wild rice in Asia, Wild rice & Native Americans, Pearl millet temperature, Climate change & fruit/veg

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Everything about size

Whizz-bang websites in support of data-dense papers seem to be all the rage.

Remember “Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis,” published in the inaugural The Lancet Planetary Health a couple of weeks back? We included it in Brainfood, and linked to an article by Jess Fanzo which summarizes the main findings. This is probably the money quote:

Both small and large farms play important roles in ensuring we have enough food that is diverse and nutrient-rich. While industrialised agriculture suggests domination of food systems, smallholder farms play a substantial role in maintaining the genetic diversity of our food supply, which results in both benefits and risk reductions against nutritional deficiencies, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. Herrero and colleagues argue that if we want to ensure that the global food supply remains diverse and generates a rich array of nutrients for human health, farm landscapes must also be diverse and serve multiple purposes.

Well, there’s also a graphics-rich website now, “Small Farms: Stewards of Global Nutrition?” The infographic at the left here puts it in the proverbial nutshell (click to embiggen).

But what you really want to know is on what kinds of farms are grown those Canadian and Indian peas we talked about yesterday in connection with other fancy websites. Well, unfortunately, the data are only available for “pulses” here, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, those are grown mainly on large(ish) farms (blue) in North America, and small(ish) farms (orange) in South Asia. Each square is 1% of global production.

You can get similar breakdowns for different food groups (cereals, oils, etc.), and for a bunch of different nutrients: Calcium, Calories, Folate, Iron, Protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin B12, and Zinc. For all of these last you can also see global maps of nutritional yields, or “the number of people who can meet their nutritional needs from all of the crops, livestock, and fish grown in an area.” Here’s the one for Vitamin A.

Which I’m sure will be of use in targeting the promotion of homegardening, say, or the roll-out of things like orange sweet potatoes. There is Biofortification Priority Index already, but only at a fairly coarse, country level. As far as I know, anyway.

Of course, those countries could always import sweet potatoes…

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Nibbles: ICARDA genebank, Mexican honeys, NWFP news, Schisandra, Swimming camels, Barley genome, Silly video, Tasty breeders, Tall maize, Praying for the prairie, Rosaceous breeding, Millet fair, Sesame entrepreneurs, European AnGR, Thai gardens, Apple resistance, Native Californians

  • Latest on the ICARDA genebank from the author of The Profit of the Earth.
  • Honey diversity in Mexico.
  • Speaking of which, did we already point to the new, improved Non-wood Forest Products Newsletter?
  • The schisandra berry is apparently helping save the panda. Yeah, I never heard of it either, but more power to its elbow.
  • Make your day better by looking at pictures of aquatic camels.
  • Oh, here we go, cue the endless stream of stories about how genomics will save beer.
  • “In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared.” No, they bloody haven’t. Only linking to this for completeness.
  • Breeders get into flavour. Because celebrity chefs.
  • That’s one tall maize plant. No, but really tall.
  • The Great Plains are in Great Trouble: “Hundreds of species call the prairie home… A cornfield, on the other hand, is a field of corn.”
  • A project dedicated to the genetic improvement of US rosaceous crops. Love that word. Rosaceous.
  • Eat those millets!
  • Sesame opens doors in Tanzania. See what I did there?
  • Interview on conserving Europe’s livestock diversity.
  • WorldVeg empowers women through gardening. I know how they feel. Well, kinda.
  • Want a Forbidden Apple? You know you do. #resist
  • “Accustomed to seeing crops planted in straight rows featuring one or a few different varieties, Muir and his European predecessors were not prepared to recognize this subtler form of horticulture. And so they viewed California Indians as lazily gathering the fat of a landscape they had hardly touched.”
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Canadian peas in India

Speaking of nifty websites, I’ve just come across resourcetrade.earth, from Chatham House, which enables

…users to explore the fast-evolving dynamics of international trade in natural resources, the sustainability implications of such trade, and the related interdependencies that emerge between importing and exporting countries and regions.

That of course includes agricultural trade, with the data coming mainly from FAO and USDA. Which means you can do interesting mash-ups with the global diets data we blogged about a couple of days back.

For example, here on the left are the data on the contribution of pulses to total food weight in the Indian diet, courtesy of that fabulous CIAT website. Note the steady increase in pea consumption over the past 30 years or so (click on the image to make it bigger, it’s the plot in the bottom right hand corner).

A lot of those peas, it turns out, now come from abroad, Canada mostly (as you can see on the map below). It’s a $500 million market, up from $30 million in 2000.

Now, I don’t know what proportion of Indian pea consumption is down to Canadian imports, but it should be possible to figure it out. I’m betting a fair bit of the aloo mutter you have in Amritsar is made in Canada.