Did we note that Will Allen, urban farmer extraordinaire, won the Genius Award last year? Congratulations! Via.
Nibbles: Urban agriculture, Rural agriculture, Assisted migration, FAO prize, Traditional medicine, Diseaese
- IDRC reports on Agriculture in urban planning.
- French end subsidy hypocrisy. Mais non? Mais oui! Via .
- More on assisted migration.
- Chinese pig farmer wins FAO plaudits.
- India puts traditional remedies into public domain for their own good.
- Kenyan crops in trouble from diseases.
Rare crops need love too
Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, argues that the world is currently too reliant on just a handful of key species of edible plants for food.
Welcome aboard, Prof. Hopper!
Meta-analyzing ecological agriculture
Meta-analyze the meta-analyses on ecological agriculture and this — at least according to Lim Li Ching, a researcher at Third World Network — is what you get:
It is clear that ecological agriculture is productive and has the potential to meet food security needs, particularly in the African context. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development concurs that an increase and strengthening of agricultural knowledge, science and technology toward agroecological sciences will contribute to addressing environmental issues while maintaining and increasing productivity (IAASTD, 2008). Moreover, ecological agricultural approaches allow farmers to improve local food production with low-cost, readily available technologies and inputs, without causing environmental damage.
Miguel Altieri thinks that small farms is where the most ecological and sustainable agriculture is predominantly taking place, and that we need to support that. He repeatedly mentions that they are havens of agrobiodiversity, but he doesn’t mention another meta-analysis that shows that small farms are diverse farms.
LATER: From Brazil, “how family farmers may have benefited benefit from the implication of large retail chains in the organic sector and how an economically and ecologically outstanding agriculture may arise from these circumstances.”
Turkey offers D-8 agrobiodiversity conservation help
There’s a bit of follow-up on the news from a few weeks back that Turkey was planning to build another genebank. At a meeting of the D-8 countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Nigeria), Turkey’s Agriculture and Rural Affairs Minister Mehmet Mehdi Eker proposed that “the seed bank to be established within D8 countries be housed in Turkey.” So it will be a sort of regional backup facility? Hard to say. The plot thickens.