- Potato fest at the Vavilov Institute next week. Report for us!
- Gary Nabhan on tortillas made of “mesquite pods, the flour of ground, popped amaranth seeds, wheat flour and olive oil.”
- EU to fund promotion of agricultural products, including information campaigns on the EU system of PDO, PGI, TSG, QWPSR et al. Via.
- Diversity good even within individuals.
- Engaging children in Sahelian agriculture and agrobiodiversity.
IUCN in Wonderland
In a recent article, Jeff Sayer, IUCN’s Scientific Advisor, turns to agrobiodiversity. Here’s the crux of his argument:
In simple economic terms, small diverse farms may be less efficient than specialist farmers with genetically engineered seeds and large inputs of fertilizers and pesticides. But these highly diverse small farms provide many other products for consumption and sale beyond just the key staple.
This diversity provides safety nets in cases of failure of one or a few crops. In addition, conservationists are now recognizing that these small farms can support a lot of native biodiversity, protect watersheds and store large amounts of carbon and so contribute to mitigating climate change.
Which is something we’ve been saying here forever; well, ever since we started. So Dr Sayer is not going to get any of what I believe is sometimes called “push-back” from us. At least not on that broad point. He does, however, lose me on the details. Here’s the take-home message of the article.
Local production of a high diversity of crops with minimal use of fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels is now a boutique industry for the rich. However, it has a lot of features that could make it a viable and attractive option for large parts of the developing world and it could provide much needed resilience in the face of climate variability and other shocks that will certainly shake the world in the future.
Wait, rich world niche ecoagriculture should be adopted in the developing world so that African farmers too can be resilient in the face of climate change? Surely there’s something of Alice in Wonderland’s surreal world about this way of putting things. Maybe I’m missing something. But no, here’s something from earlier in the piece.
Farm conservation schemes in the USA put tens of billions of dollars into the hands of farmers who adapt their farming to favour wildlife. The critical question is whether these multi-functional farming systems are a luxury that only the rich world can afford or whether they might be a model for diversifying the livelihoods of poor people in the developing world and maybe make them more resilient to the economic, climatic and pandemic-induced shocks that they will confront in coming decades.
Right, so US farm conservation schemes are going to teach African and Asian and Latin American subsistence farmers about diversification. Well, that’s something I’d pay money to see.
I suppose the point struggling to come through is that agricultural development in the South should not put all its eggs in the efficiency basket. It’s a good point, which could have been better made. The developing world doesn’t need to look at rich world organic farming for a model. All it has to do is look at itself.
Nibbles: Camel sweets, UG99, British woods, Rice, India and climate change, Soay sheep, Fish, Seed fair, Barn owls, Food maps, Earthworms
- Chocolate made from camel milk for the first time. And last?
- “Slow rusting” genes from Ethiopian wheat landraces.
- Brits (and Yanks, for that matter) look for ancient trees in woodlands becoming ever less distinctive.
- The world needs GM rice, but alas “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.” Meanwhile, IRRI keeps hammering away at drought tolerance and resistance to other assorted stresses. It’s hard being rice.
- ICAR looks at the likely effects of climate change on crops and what can be done about it.
- Climate change making Soay sheep (and, incidentally, European fish too) not just smaller, also darker. Speaking of fish, there’s trouble in the Zambezi too, but not necessarily due to climate change. Although…
- A Greek seed bazaar.
- FAO turns to barn owls to stop Laotian rodent plague.
- US food policy destinations on Google Maps.
- Vermicomposting is good news for the Indian textile industry. Vermicomposting: I like saying that word.
A fifty-year Farm Bill
When we nibbled an article from The Land Institute’s Stan Cox a couple of days ago it prompted a heartfelt outburst against the “holier than thou organic only everyting else be dammed mindset”. So I’m wondering what Anastasia and others will make of a Q&A in today’s Washington Post. Three of the wisest men in “alternative” agriculture in the US — Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann — were in Washington to promote an alternative Farm Bill, one that takes a long-term view and that “values not only yields but also local ecosystems, healthy food and rural communities”. The Post took the opportunity to get some answers to pressing questions, such as “Washington doesn’t think in 50-year increments. How do you sell this?”.
Jackson: You sell it the same way as global warming or population growth. Washington thinks it’s going to deal with the global warming problem in 50 years? We will have this if we get cracking.
Kirschenmann: Because of our election cycles, you’re right. People tend to think in terms of two-year, four-year or six-year cycles. But I think the effort to deal with climate change is starting to change with that, because they know they can’t deal with climate change on that timeline. They have to extend the horizon. So we think the time is right to add agriculture to that.
I’d like to think they can do it, but I’m not optimistic.
Nibbles: Turmeric, Tillage, AGRA, Research
- The wonders of turmeric.
- The wonders of reduced tillage (in arid Ethiopia).
- The wonders of massive influence. AGRA’s President speaks.
- The wonders of the internet. Who needs well-documented seed collections?