Category: Policy

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Cuba’s urban ag miracle has feet of clay

Proponents of urban and peri-urban agriculture, ourselves included, have a poster-child: Cuba. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a big market for sugar exports, the Cubans became more self reliant and replaced the food they could no longer afford to import with bounteous harvests from small urban plots.

Alas, all is not quite so rosy in the organopónico. A new book, noted at HungryCity, points out that these plots supply just 5% of Cuba’s food. Furthermore, 75% of Cuban farmers use agrochemicals, and 83% would apply more if they could. Despite masses of evidence that organic land in Cuba really was more productive than conventional farms, the country is reverting to a conventional model.

I came to that post via this one at Spillway, where Will Wiles dissects the issue:

[T]he proponents of urban farming often muddle up doing it because we must (that is, we face shortages if we do not) and doing it because we should (self-reliance being a virtue, food security being desirable and so on) — necessity and desirability. And it’s the questions of necessity that tend to be the most powerful arguments: no one wants to face shortages. But if people see urban farming as only a necessity, it will only ever be seen as an emergency response to a crisis, to be rolled back when (if) more secure times return. This appears to be the condition Cuba is in. But that simply sets society back on the road to consumer-dependence of food produced invisibly elsewhere.

Moving to a more diverse and stable system of food production — including some urban farming — has to accent that is is a desirable option in good times and bad.

That makes a lot of sense to me; urban ag and greater diversity can deliver both resilience and better nutrition, health, incomes etc etc. I wish I had the skills and time to do a decent analysis of an idea that has long intrigued me. At the moment global food supply is dominated by cheap refined carbohydrates and appalling meat. People are not fools; they buy the cheapest calories they can. And that does not include good nutrition. So, why not integrate intensive (but preferably less harmful) production of storable, shippable commodities with local production of the extras that are so vital for a diverse diet that is tasty and nutritious?

There’s more at Spillway about Art and Food, but time is short today and I can’t summon the energy to unpack it or to respond. You might fare better.

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Mo’ better modeling

Two papers in the Journal of Biogeography suggest ways of improving ecological niche modeling, by including soil data and by recognizing that the range of a species may not be in “equilibrium with its climatic niche.” May need to blog in more details about these…

Incidentally, modeling species responses to climate change is no longer just an academic exercise, it’s a policy tool:

Brazil has shown the way with extensive modelling, leading to zoning schemes where farmers can obtain cheap credit for planting crops recommended by the models. It is now among the top three exporters for ten global commodities, including coffee.

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Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI

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    Nibbles: Drought resistant rice, Bees, Bison, Coffee in Kenya, Cassava in Africa, Pigeon pea, Chickens in Uganda, Green ranching in the Amazon, Climate change, Dates, Museums and DNA, Organic, Ecology meet

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    Protecting rice in Thailand and India

    I’ve pointed to a couple of different stories in the past few weeks dealing with the legal protection of rice diversity, and I thought it might be a good idea to bring them together here.

    The first concerned aromatic Jasmine rice from Thailand. This was the lead paragraph:

    On Wednesday, His Majesty the King applauded Thai scientists and those involved in the patenting of genes that can control the aroma of Thai jasmine rice. His Majesty said the patent would ensure that Thais take pride in eating Thai rice. They won’t have to eat rice that has a foreign patent.

    However, it turns out the patent is actually for a transgenic aromatic rice, which is not quite the same thing. In fact, it would be difficult to protect the gene controlling the aroma of Thai rice, because that same gene also controls aroma in all other aromatic rices around the world. A recent paper suggests as much:

    The badh2 mutation … [was] surveyed in a representative rice collection, including traditional aromatic and non-aromatic rice varieties, and strongly suggested a monophylogenetic origin of this badh2 mutation in Asian cultivated rices.

    The second article is about rice with a red pericarp. This is often said to have health benefits, due to the accumulation of various nutrients along with anthocyanins.

    Scientists are trying to protect a traditional rice variety that is on the verge of extinction in Himachal Pradesh. The red rice is more disease-resistant and hardier than strains cultivated commercially over most of India and can lend that through cross-breeding.”We are trying to provide legal protection to the vanishing red rice variety, grown in the state for centuries, by bringing it under the ambit of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001,” R.P. Kaushik, director of the rice research centre at CSK HP Krishi Vishvavidyalaya, an agricultural university based in Palampur. told IANS.

    Now, red pericarp is the ancestral state in rice, and it’s occurrence is geographically widespread. ((It turns up in at least 20 countries in Asia and Africa, according to our mole at IRRI.)) So, again, if this rice is to be protected, it could not be protected simply as “red rice”, but rather as a particular, clearly defined, variety of red rice. Anyway, as Bhuwon points out in his comment on the article, if it fetches such high prices as the article suggest, is there really a need for legislative protection?

    But then, arguments for legal protection of genetic resources are not always grounded in anything more than a sort of reflexive place-ism.