- Calestous Juma gives new FAO head some advice: find a role, build on what farmers do and know, engage civil society, help governments prioritize, and slash bureaucracy.
- Religion and conservation: friends of enemies?
- Eastern Africa Agricultural Productivity Project seems to be mainly about setting up regional centres of excellence in dairy, cassava, rice and wheat. Maybe ASARECA should ask for some advice from Prof. Juma?
- Land use map of the UK. Let the mash-upping begin.
- Training in sustainable conservation agriculture in India and Mexico. But how really sustainable is the whole thing if based on modern varieties? Oh, and Brazil too.
- Saving the Amazon for $33 a month.Or maybe just a buck?
- Local cooking a long way from home, Part I; from Colombia to Washington DC.
- Local cooking a long way from home, Part II; from everywhere to New York’s Lower East Side.
- Don’t worry, exploding watermelons are perfectly safe, and legal.
- FAO updates its webpage on “Implementing the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources” and documents the fact by providing a time stamp. Jeremy chuffed.
Diverse seeds for disaster relief
SciDev.net reports on a new study reinforcing the view that after a disaster that wipes out seed stocks the local, informal seed system “in the form of loans or gifts of seed from friends and relatives” is more likely to restore agrobiodiversity to the farming systems than seed relief and markets. The study looked specifically at cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) after disastrous floods in Gaza Province, Mozambique, and strengthens the more general conclusion that seeds already in the local system offer the best chance of restoration.
I can’t help wondering, however, whether disasters of this kind might not also offer an opportunity to inject extra diversity into farming systems. Not just any old diversity, as might be provided by seed relief or generous private sector suppliers, but diversity selected to perform well under predicted climatic conditions in the disaster area. A savvy genebank system, working with relief agencies, might be able to supply small amounts of pre-selected diversity that farmers would be willing to try under the circumstances. And some of that diversity might even be better than what they had before the disaster.
Just a thought.
Nibbles: IRRI genebank, Andeans, Satoyama, Forestry fellowship
- IRRI explains its rice genebank. Is this new? Why are so many pages on the internets undated?
- Owen takes his Andean roots and tubers to another county. NatGeo not interested.
- FAO recognizes two Satoyama sites as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, making eight in total.
- Sub-Saharan Foresty Funding from the 2011 Abdou-Salam Ouédraogo fellowship.
Australian interest in Food Security
The Crawford Fund in Australia supports a lot of good work on agricultural biodiversity and more sustainable agriculture, but its website is a bugger. No RSS feed. And sometimes no way to link to an interesting story. Or at least, none that I can see. Nothing for it but a spot of copy and paste.
There has been a renewed focus on food security in the media of late with a range of national and metropolitan papers focusing on the topic. And the most recent AusAID “Focus” magazine is themed on food and food security, with an article by The Crawford Fund focusing on the rewards of research. Following a Crawford Fund ‘seeing is believing’ visit to Vietnam, ABC TV Landline producer Kerry Straight has been working on a special feature for the program on food security, which Crawford Fund, ACIAR and CSIRO has been assisting with through this year. The feature has now gone to air focusing on a broad range of issues related to food security from both the developing country and Australian perspectives. The feature includes a range of speakers who were part of the Crawford Fund’s State Parliamentary Conference in Brisbane in April this year. In late June, the 35min feature went to air on Landline on “The Future of Food” including Kanayo Nwanze, Julian Cribb, Rick Roush, Michael D’Occhio, Peter Carberry and others. The story can be found here. The feature provides a good overview of the complexity of the food security issue, stressing the importance of R&D. Visits to East Africa and to Aceh are currently being supported as the next Crawford Fund ‘seeing is believing’ visits.
I love the idea of “seeing is believing” tours.
What’s wrong with Commons anyway?
The abstract of a new paper in PNAS is fascinating. The paper is called Risk of collective failure provides an escape from the tragedy of the commons, and what it seems to be saying is that a small group, which will pay dearly for failure, is more likely to manage a commons successfully. This seems deeply obvious. Garrett Hardin himself said that one of his biggest tragedies was the failure to call his ground-breaking 1968 Science paper The Tragedy of the Mismanaged Commons, for there is nothing inherently tragic in the idea of a commons. 1 Exclusive community rights, and shame, he reckoned, were usually enough to keep a commons sustainable. So I’m probably missing the point, and I currently don’t have access to the full paper to find out what Santos & Pacheco, authors of the paper, are saying in full. Take this bit from the abstract, for example:
We also offer insights on the scale at which public goods problems of cooperation are best solved. Instead of large-scale endeavors involving most of the population, which as we argue, may be counterproductive to achieve cooperation, the joint combination of local agreements within groups that are small compared with the population at risk is prone to significantly raise the probability of success.
Does this mean that we should leave it to politicians or professional negotiators to hammer out global agreements? Surely not as long as they require our approval, or (financial) support. And how might the conclusions of Santos & Pacheco apply to, say, negotiating access to the global “commons” of genetic resources? Answers on a postcard please.