Category: Policy

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US lawmakers taking irony supplements

Missed this first time around, but courtesy of the magic of interconnectivity — Thanks Sam — I am able to reflect on some reflections.

If you’re eager to improve the food (and other) security of smallholder farmers, or the nutritional status of young people you might, once, have looked to the US to lead the way, at least as far as smallholder farmers and young people in other countries, poor countries, are concerned. At home? No such luck.

Headline

As Alex Tabarrok said in his post Not from the Onion, over at Marginal Revolution, “The headline says it all”.

Tabarrok quotes extensively from the Washington Post article that furnished the fine headline above. I can do no better than to quote him.

[A]nyone who argues against making school meals healthier because it’s too expensive at the same time as they vote for keeping billions of dollars in farm subsidies is not concerned about expenses. What unites the bill is not ideology but protection of agribusiness.

Say it isn’t so!

Not a peep out of the G20 meeting, yet; although much has been said about controlling prices, the only mentions of subsidies I’ve found are in the context of biofuels which, according to the US, “are job creators, not hunger villain” (sic). (I don’t suppose they could be both?) Far keener intellects than mine have considered the influence of rich-world agricultural subsidies on poor-world food insecurity, and the overall message is that they malevolent.

It’s just a shame, I suppose, that what happens to smallholder farmers and poorly nourished young people at home more or less mirrors what happens to them in other countries, poorer countries.

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Nibbles: Cranberry pests, Productivity, Resistance breeding, Jackfruit, Oca etc, Millets, Root crops, Semen cryo

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Ecoagriculture reviewed, again

It was over two years ago that we mentioned a meta-meta analysis of ecoagriculture. Since then we’ve had Prof. Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, weighing in, among other celebrities. Now David Suzuki, no less, tells us about yet another review, with much the same bottom line:

…our review supports the claim that the solutions to the problems of widespread food insecurity and biodiversity loss need not be mutually exclusive, and that it may be possible to address both using appropriate alternative agricultural practices.

Here I just want to throw something else into the mix. We know from yet another recent meta-analysis that there are recognizable socioeconomic patterns to the distribution of infraspecific crop diversity on farm. A study has just been published which suggests that the number of species cultivated by a traditional society can be predicted by latitude, environmental heterogeneity (mainly altitude), and the commitment of the society to agriculture (as opposed to herding, foraging and exchange). Does this mean there are some intrinsic limits to the level of intra- and inter-specific agrobiodiversity a given agricultural system will support? And if so, what does that mean for ecoagriculture in that region?

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Nibbles: Median strips, Vitamin A, Mapping in Kenya, Chaffey, Small farms, Rennell Island coconuts, Sweet potato breeding, Acacia nomenclature, Crop models, Pulque, Fruits

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How to buy on-farm conservation

An item on the website of Conservation Magazine describes how best to buy ecosystem services. It distinguishes “payments for action” from “payments for results”.

Farmers in Europe, it says, are paid to mow their hayfields to create habitat for birds, and get the cash regardless of how many birds use the grasslands. That’s payment for action.

In Cambodia, by contrast, villagers are paid to conserve forests, “but only if visiting birdwatchers see certain unusual species”. Payment for results.

Most current schemes to pay for ecosystem services apparently reward actions, rather than results. But which method actually delivers better results?

In general, “payment by action is favored where there is a clear action” that will clearly benefit biodiversity and is relatively easy to measure, they concluded. So paying to increase wetland habitat for birds known to frequent marshes would make sense.

In contrast, in degraded landscapes, or in places where conservationists aren’t sure which actions will bring the most benefit, it might make more sense to pay for results.

The conclusions emerge not from any kind of field study but from a theoretical model “consisting of one conservation agency, one land manager and one patch of habitat. The model assumed that the land manager wanted to maximize income from the patch. The agency, meanwhile, had a limited budget and wanted to get the biggest biodiversity boost for its buck.”

How to apply this to on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity? It’s complex. Research is currently going on at Bioversity and elsewhere, with some nifty approaches that, for example, allow different communities to bid for the payments, establishing a market that economist Adam Drucker says allows you to get more conservation for the same amount of money. He has also been exploring the tensions between economic efficiency and social equity; do members of the community resent some being paid more than others for the “same” conservation. A peer-reviewed journal has accepted a paper for publication; we’ll bring you news of an “easier” version of the story when we have it.