Lawrence Haddad, of the Institute for Development Studies in the UK, has an interesting post up on Trying to work across the health-development divide. I’ve no intention of trying to summarise here, just pointing it out as sharing insights into some of the real difficulties of working on, say, agricultural biodiversity and diet. Likewise, Science magazine has a special on Disease Prevention that includes non-communicable diseases associated with nutrition.
Nibbles: Polyploidy study, Agrobiodiversity policy, Organic livestock, Innovation, Buffett on small farms
- $2 million to study strawberries sounds like quite a lot, but then it is to investigate polyploidy in general.
- Agroforesters hear about IPR and agrobiodiversity. Probably not for the first, or last, time.
- Let’s not forget that even animal husbandry can be organic.
- “A lack of evidence to convince policymakers holds back progress on grassroots innovation in agriculture.” Weird; doesn’t seem to hold them back on anything else.
- What Howard G. Buffett knows about small farms. Campaign for Real Farming has made his words available.
Malawi changes tack
Malawi has long been the posterchild for the subsidize-maize-fertiliser-and-all-will-be-well school of agricultural development. The success of the government’s programme was touted wherever aid experts gather.
“For four years in a row, a starving country is no longer a starving country,” said Pedro Sanchez, an advisor to the Malawian government who directs the Tropical Agriculture and the Rural Environment Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University, extravagantly praised cheap fertiliser in his book, The New Harvest. And he singled out Malawi’s miracle in a 2010 interview with New Scientist magazine.
African soils are in a poor state because of the low use of fertiliser. Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s president, is showing the lead here. He is giving subsidies to farmers to buy fertiliser.
But what’s this? Malawi has now decided to give away goats and to promote alternative crops, and is passing a nutrition act that bans the sale of “non-fortified basic foodstuffs”. The country is acting as if there’s more to food security than bumper maize harvests. And they admit it!
Senior civil servants claim the moves mark a departure from farming policies that simply aimed to fill people up with staple maize in lean times. Food shortages affect 1.6 million people every year, and an estimated 47% of children have stunted growth because of undernutrition, making them more vulnerable to illness and learning difficulties.
This has to have been on the books longer than the recent grain shortages plaguing the south of Malawi, and the country’s troubles are far from over. But if the shift in direction does make the country both better nourished and less susceptible to shocks, perhaps we’ll start hearing less about simplistic solutions to wicked problems.
Nibbles: Diversification talk, Gene award, Community genebanks, GCARD, Natural products, Nutrition talk, Wild bees, GM for drought fail, Face of breeding, Cheese, Bird, Cacao smuggling, CWRs, Perreniation
- ICRISAT DG agrees with Bioversity DG. Kinda. CGIAR DGs communicating via blog. Who’d have thunk it.
- Borlaug Global Rust Initiative gives its first Gene Stewardship Award to Nepali breeders. I wonder if they work with community genebanks at all. Or what they think about them. Or even if they know they are there.
- GCARD 2 is coming, socially networked up the wazoo. Be afraid.
- Authenticating natural health products via barcoding.
- FAO discussion on making agriculture work for nutrition.
- Nice photos of wild bees.
- Not sure if we already linked to the big report on why biotechnology is not delivering drought-resistant crops.
- Meet a Breeder. Conventional, natch.
- Who moved my artisanal cheese?
- Bird diversity on intensive farms like happy Tolstoyan familes: the same everywhere.
- What’s a poor cacao farmer to do? Obey the law and make a loss, or break it in the hope of breaking even?
- Kew does the crop wild relatives thing for Plantwise, and check out that picture!
- Nature discovers perreniation as salvation of African soils; can resilieficiency be far behind?
Nibbles: Yams, Wild relatives, Plant breeding, Bamboo, Funding, Leaves, Red rice, Rice breeder, Governance and poverty
- Yams heading for trouble. What to do?
- Learn something from wild relatives, like they’re doing with tomatoes?
- Go for a totally new plant breeding paradigm?
- I know, let’s all go out and celebrate World Bamboo Day!
- Switzerland gives Laos US$6.3m in support of government’s agrobiodiversity initiative.
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation gives Growing Power US$5m in support of Growing Power’s urban agriculture efforts.
- National Geographic gives leaves a good going-over without mentioning agriculture.
- Farmers in Kerala give Navara red rice as a reason for good health and prosperity.
- World gives Monty Jones, rice breeder, high status.
- Paul Collier fan gives African governance the blame for low agricultural productivity.