Category: Policy

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Gates embraces diversity?

This post has two purposes. The first is to try and explain the shenanigans yesterday. That’s possibly of interest to only a few geeks who care about journalistic ethics. 1 The second is warmly to welcome some of the comments made by Bill Gates as he announced a further US$120 million for agricultural research. That should be of interest to everyone except monocultural thinkers.

Second things first. Judging from the stories we’ve seen, the Gates’ announcement might just mark a shift in the Foundation’s priorities. 2 That pesky iAfrica.com site, which started all the trouble, has perhaps the longest report, which contains several nuggets.

Gates will warn that as scientists, governments, and others strive to repeat the successes of the original Green Revolution, they should be careful not to repeat its mistakes, such as the overuse of fertilizer and irrigation.

“The next Green Revolution has to be greener than the first,” Gates will say. “It must be guided by small-holder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.”

That’s as clear a statement as any we’ve seen that Africa’s problems will require a huge diversity of solutions, and that African farmers may well know what they need. But this is the real money quote:

Gates will say that major breakthroughs in the fight against hunger and poverty are now within reach [and] he will caution that progress toward alleviating global hunger is “endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two.”

On one side, he will say, there are groups that support technological solutions to increase agricultural productivity without proper regard to environmental and sustainability concerns. On the other, there are those who react negatively to any emphasis on productivity.

“It’s a false choice, and it’s dangerous for the field,” Gates will say. “It blocks important advances. It breeds hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers. The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability — and there is no reason we can’t have both.”

That, quite simply, is music to our ears. We’ve been saying the same ourselves at every opportunity. And given that today is a rather special day for us, we’re going to delude ourselves into thinking that someone out there reads us and even pays attention to our ramblings.

Thanks.

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Nibbles: Sheep, Syrup, Antioxidants, Urban flora, Politics, Erosion, Prince, India and climate change

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Global Hunger Index goes interactive

The Global Hunger Index for 2009 has just been released with a very cool interactive map (see above). 3 There’s a general release from our friends at IFPRI and one focused on sub-Saharan Africa.

Coincidentally, or not, this just in: 4

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on Thursday will urge governments, donors, researchers, farmer groups, environmentalists, and others to set aside old divisions and join forces to help millions of the world’s poorest farming families boost their yields and incomes so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.

Gates will say the effort must be guided by the farmers themselves, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.

The occasion for both news items is the award, tomorrow, of the World Food Prize to Dr Gebisa Ejeta.

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Empty vessels and GMOs

You know the old story about the two women ranting at one another from their respective doorsteps on opposite sides of a narrow street. And a passing wit 5 remarked: “They will never agree, for they argue from different premises”. That’s how I feel about almost everything and everyone involved in almost every kind of discussion of genetic engineering.

Watch, if you will, this extract from a longer discussion with Michael Pollan, foodsayer extraordinaire.

Now, tell me, what exactly did he say that might cause someone else to say

I’m thinking he is just another tool. Now he suddenly supports “open source” genetic engineering…absolutely not….playing god/artifically manipulating DNA is not our place.

What’s with the “scare quotes”? How does a self-described seed breeder manage to elide playing god with artificially manipulating DNA?

I’m reminded of another quote, this one definitely attributable to Woody Allen. It runs something like this 6

The great advantage of being smart is that you can always act like an imbecile, while the reverse is never possible.

Hell yeah.

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Tragedy of a bad title

Like lots of better-informed people, I too had not heard of Elinor 7 Ostrom, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. But when Luigi alerted me this morning to the award, and I read what he called a “place-marker” post, I had only one reaction.

Many years ago I corresponded a bit with Garrett Hardin, whose paper in Science provided the title for Luigi (and scores of others) to riff on. In the course of that, I said that I didn’t think that the average commons was much of a tragedy, given the various examples he cited of a well-managed commons. And he replied to the effect that the title of that paper was one of his biggest mistakes. He should have called it The Tragedy of the Mismanaged Commons.

Of course I treasure that letter, along with a few others, which is why I kept it somewhere very safe, which is why I cannot now lay my hands on it. And I think of it whenever people assume, as they do all too often, that a commons is inevitably tragic.

All of which hardly matters at all, except that it seems we really ought to know more about Ostrom’s work. Bits and pieces are blipping into life on the radar screen, and will clearly require some study.

This, from Tyler Cowan, is helpful.

For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate. In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law. Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.

I like the idea of “legislation that does not conflict with law”. And this series of posts will clearly repay study.

However, we would like to extend an invitation to anyone out there who would consider rewarding us, and our readers, with a better account of how Ostrom’s ideas might apply in particular to agricultural biodiversity, as a global commons, as a public good, as anything, frankly. You write it, we’ll stick it up here.

Thanks.