On World AIDS Day, it would be nice to be able to point to how agrobiodiversity can help the more than 40 million people living with HIV around the world. Not easy, alas. There’s an FAO strategy-type document from 2003. And what looks like a project from Wageningen University that’s just about to end. But very little else in the way of concrete examples, at least that I could find in the first few pages of a Google search. There was a piece today reviewing the role of nutrition in dealing with HIV/AIDS, but this mainly dealt with supplements. Can this possibly be it?
Technology is not enough, part 2
Policy makers should give as much emphasis to incentives and affordability of modern inputs as to their efforts to ensure availability of technologies. Non-technical issues are just as important. The wider innovation system, encompassing technology delivery, marketing, and wider institutional and policy issues — most notably land — must be looked at more comprehensively, if productivity boosts in grain staples is to create the wider growth effects in the economy, with advantages for poorer and richer farmers alike.
This time from Ethiopia.
Nibbles: Sustainable agriculture, Zizania
- Llamas protect livestock from predators. And so much more about making agriculture wilder.
- Distant wild relative of rice runs amok in New Zealand.
Technology is not enough
Greater investment in improving agricultural technology certainly needs to be part of the solution to meet the rising demand for food. But if spatially connective infrastructure (roads and bridges in particular) and complementary services such as agricultural extension are ignored, these findings from Bangladesh suggest that few farmers in lagging but potentially productive regions will benefit, thwarting the goal of raising agricultural productivity.
Nature with a capital N
The Prince of Wales is at it again. In The Times he writes about our need to reconnect with Nature.
You may believe that I have some reactionary obsession with returning to a kind of mock medieval, forelock-tugging past. All I am saying is that we simply cannot contend with the global environmental crises we face by relying on clever technological “fixes†on their own.
His enemy is Modernism. His answer is Harmony. “In denying the invisible ‘grammar of harmony’ we create cacophony and dissonance.”
Complexity is key to life. The diversity that made up this complexity was bulldozed in the pursuit of simplicity and convenience, creating an appeal that continues to fuel the conspicuous consumption and throwaway societies we see everywhere.
Not a Darwinistic struggle but a community effort, then: “Biology shows that (…) life seeks balance. Every organism works together to produce a harmonic whole.” Well, I try.