- “…for many for many smallholder farmers little has changed over the decades in terms of the methods and tools they use.” Geoff Tansey would seem to agree. Nobody has told ACIAR, though.
- Cherfas favourite spread bog butter among oldest food finds.
- Why it is silly to say that GMOs are always bad.
- The Star Trek tricorder-type DNA widget comes a step closer.
- Which will make it easier to do things like working out the evolution of palms. Before it’s too late. Because of all that nasty agriculture. Anyway, read about it on page 3 of Kew Scientist, along with lots of other stuff.
- Like the taxonomy of herbal medicine, for instance, which coincidentally also comes up in a newspaper article from Australia today. Maybe some of the plants involved will go into the Kimberly Ark, whatever that is.
- Passion fruit is the next big thing in Costa Rica.
- Colombian peasant organizations go to market. Including, I bet, with passion fruits.
- Even in the struggle between man and steer, the issue is uncertain.
- Is it time for Plant Cuttings again? Thank goodness.
- I think I’ll read it with some Danish wine at my elbow. Or maybe Vietnamese coffee.
Market failure
Edward Carr’s continuing series on Doing Food Security Differently comes to a real fork in the road. Over and over again, one hears economists say that we have to connect poor farmers to markets, that’s the only way they’ll ever make it out of poverty. Carr points out that
[S]implifying one’s farm to focus on only a few key crops for which there is “comparative advantage”, and then using the proceeds to buy food, clothing, shelter and other necessities, works great when the market for those crops is strong. But what happens when the food you need to buy becomes more dear than the crops you are growing, for example through food price spikes or a shift in markets that leave one’s farm worth only a fraction of what is needed to feed and clothe one’s family?
To which I would add that even without price spikes or a shift in markets, the cash you earn might not be enough to buy back the nutrition you lose by focusing on a few key crops.
Carr’s main point is that the governments under which poor farmers labour are generally unlikely to be able to step in with safety nets when farmers need them. Not that safety nets are the answer, but in changing traditional cropping patterns, you also change traditional safety nets.
If, in coastal Ghana, you are growing maize and cassava as your principal crops, you can sell both in years where the market is good, and you can eat both in years where the market turns on you. I have referred to opting out of markets as temporary deglobalization, where people opt in and out of markets as they gauge their risks and opportunities.
Forcing farmers away from this model … removes the option of turning away from markets and eating the crops in conditions of years where the markets are not favorable. This is even more true when some of that newly reduced crop mix only takes value from sale on global markets (i.e. cocoa) and/or which cannot be eaten (i.e. cotton).
Nibbles: SRI, Zoophagy, Dogfood, Wetlands, Peach DNA
- More than you ever needed to know about SRI. Not just rice.
- Ditto eating the zoo. In 1879.
- Ditto the diversity of dogfood. There isn’t much, beneath the palatants.
- Ditto moving agriculture into wetlands. It’s risky.
- Ditto how very useful it will be to have the peach genome. For biofuels, natch.
Nibbles: Leaflets, IFPRI and CGIAR reamed, Locusts, Whisky, Backpacks for Africa, Yield drops, Oca, Fishy rice
- Speak French? Unaware? The Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research has leaflets for you.
- Indian writer bites the hands that feeds him. Well, somebody had to.
- Israeli eaters bite the pests that plague them.
- Debunking the mystery of whisky, the bastards. A muckle more detail here.
- Backpack Farm is in the news again. We still want to know, what’s in those backpacks, and how diverse are they.
- So you’ve been growing corn (maize) continuously and your yields are dropping precipitously? Scientists: Now we know why!
- Expert tells potato centre all about oca. Fact No. 1: it isn’t a potato.
- “Rice-fish cultivation produces environmental services.” What, in addition to rice and fish? Praise be.
Food security is hard
Despite decades of literature and body of experience to the contrary, it seems that the policy world, and indeed much development implementation, continues to view issues of hunger as the relatively straightforward outcome of production shortfalls that can be addressed through equally straightforward technical fixes ranging from changed farming techniques to new agricultural technologies such as GMOs. This view is frustrating, given its persistence in the face of roughly five decades of project failures and ephemeral results that evaporated at the end of “successful” projects. More nuanced work has started to think about issues of production in concert with the distribution function of markets. However, the bulk of policy and implementation along these lines couples the simplistic “technical fix” mentality of earlier work on food security with a sort of naïve market triumphalism that tends to focus on the possible benefits of market engagement with little mention or reasonable understanding of likely problematic outcomes.
Edward Carr continues to explore how better to achieve food security. Did you think it was going to be easy?