- Straws in the wind or portent of change? Why Farmers Are Embracing Social Media: the #AgChat Story
- Straws in the wind or portent of change? AGree (geddit?) Transforming Food and Ag Policy. See also Marion Nestle’s commentary and comments therein.
- More on the medicinal trees genebank in Nairobi.
- And just look at the new website of the International Potato Center genebank. Part of a complete makeover.
H.R. Clinton favours increased crop diversity shock
This just in from our colleague with the FAO building pass. (Photo hacked from IFAD’s Facebook page.
Just went and heard Hillary at FAO. She was brilliant and spoke very sensibly about food security.
She said we need higher quality seeds (more nutritious, more drought tolerant and disease resistant), we need to connect farmers to local markets and local markets to global markets. She also said we need to increase crop diversity!!
Hopefully the full transcript will be available on the FAO website at some point – she spoke very quickly!
She ended by saying that in spite of all the current headlines, she keeps her eye on the ‘trendlines’ and that we need to make advancing food security a cause for our time and deal with it now, or else we may never catch up.
LATER: Here’s the audio.
Sending the future up in smoke
Here, as our informant put it, is “today’s chapter in a seemingly never-ending story”.
The state legislature of North Carolina in the United States is minded to cut all funding to the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund. That’s short-sighted and a great shame.
Tobacco, unlike, say, opium poppy, is not an easy crop, to grow or to defend. Wendell Berry, although he doesn’t himself grow it, is surrounded by people, including family, who do and he has worked for many of them. Berry has written elegiacally about tobacco, and the essential dilemma it presents, now that demand has fallen. I can’t find my copy of that essay right now (or on the web) but the gist of it was that a high-value crop like tobacco spared the environment because by dint of skill and hard work a family could make a decent living from a relatively small patch of land for the tobacco and the food they needed.
North Carolina’s Tobacco Trust Fund was established with the state’s share of money that the tobacco companies paid in settlement of lawsuits, and is intended to protect farms and smooth the transition from tobacco to new crops, new farming systems, and new approaches to local sales. In other words, to promote diversification. By all accounts, it has worked. One advocate for, and beneficiary of, the Fund put forward these numbers:
In the past three years alone, RAFI’s Tobacco Community Reinvestment Fund has brought over $733 million into communities throughout the state and created or preserved more than 4,100 jobs. All these benefits come from a relatively modest investment: $3.6 million of Tobacco Trust Fund money distributed to 367 innovative farmers in awards of less than $10,000 per individual or $30,000 per community project. Each dollar invested has led to $205 circulating in our state’s economy, an incredible return on investment with direct benefits to our tax base.
Why North Carolina is planning to cut the Fund is not at all clear to me. This certainly isn’t a case like that of the genebanks at Pavlovsk, or Wellesbourne, or Jharkand, where land is deemed more valuable for other purposes. But it shares the same basic underlying premise; that the future can take care of itself. Where agriculture is concerned, with its dependence on living resources and human ingenuity and knowledge, that is often simply wrong. There’s money to be saved (or made) now, but only because those who make and save it now will not have to pay out in future for what they destroy now.
Not every piddling genebank or subsidy scheme deserves to remain untouched, but it doesn’t take a genius or a seer to realize that the costs down the line often far outweigh the benefits here and now. We don’t really know how to measure those costs properly, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that the rules of the game require that we do, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change the rules.
Nibbles: Coffee, British orchards, Wild foraging, African agriculture, Sesame, Taro wine, African beer, Brazilian pastures, Hemp
- First of all, I need a cup of coffee.
- Stop Press: Britain’s orchards neglected. Prince Charles to be called in to help?
- Eating the wild, in San Francisco and San Diego.
- IFAD on what African farmers need: infrastructure, insurance, investment. Apparently.
- Harvesting sesame in Greece: The video.
- Filipinos make wine from Hawaiian traditional food. Strange the Hawaiians hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps they did.
- And while we’re on the subject of booze…
- Destroying the Pantanal and Cerrado in a sustainable manner.
- Hey, it’s Hemp History Week! And you know how to celebrate that, don’t you.
Brainfood: Diet, Olives, Beef, Shade trees, Tree regeneration, Poverty, Weeds, Birds
- Farming for balanced nutrition: an agricultural approach to addressing micronutrient deficiency among the vulnerable poor in Africa. Dietary diversity is a good idea for many reasons.
- Cultivar characterization of Aegean olive oils with respect to their volatile compounds. Only two varieties, and they do differ.
- Beef Authentication and Retrospective Dietary Verification Using Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis of Bovine Muscle and Tail Hair. Back40 has an explanation of why this is more important than all the certification schemes in the world.
- Promoting native trees in shade coffee plantations of southern India: comparison of growth rates with the exotic Grevillea robusta. Some native species might be able to compete, more research needed.
- Regeneration of Vitellaria paradoxa and Parkia biglobosa in a parkland in Southern Burkina Faso. Vitellaria doing better, possibly because farmers are overharvesting Parkia seeds.
- Defining the poor by the rural communities of Burkina Faso: implications for the development of sustainable parkland management. It’s complicated.
- Does soil biota benefit from organic farming in complex vs. simple landscapes? Organic farming increases weed diversity. No word on what it does for birds, but…
- Species richness and composition of bird communities in various field margins of Poland. Some types of field margins are better than others. No word on what they do for weeds.