Category: Policy

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Goji lovers threaten devastation

The UK government is warning that illegal imports of goji (Lycium barbarum) plants threatens commercial potato and tomato crops with destruction. Goji, tomato and potato are all members of the family Solanaceae, and apparently “bugs” could come in on the clandestine gojis. According to one advisor, “the retail value of British tomato production is £150m, and potatoes are worth more than that, so the size of the industry that is under threat is pretty massive. If some bugs were to arrive here, they would be devastating.”

The Plant Health and Seeds Inspectorate destroyed my entire stock of pepino (Solanum muricatum) in a former life because of some viral threat, even though the plants they confiscated initially tested negative. It’s easy to think that these “invading pests and diseases” threats are just crying wolf, but all the evidence suggests that intensive plantings are indeed very vulnerable. Of course, why that should be so is another matter …

I’m not sure how the UK government plans to sniff out every goji plant, but Sir Mick Jagger and Kate Moss, goji enthusiasts, presumably have plans to cope. Let’s hope proposed imports get up to speed soon, and don’t carry the bugs.

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Turfing out the lawn

Smaller American Lawns Today. Edible Estates. Freedom Lawns. Recent thinking about the American suburban lawn sounds like a microcosm of the debate about diversity and sustainability in agriculture in general. Read all about it in The New Yorker.

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Extending extension

I have a thing about extension. I believe it is the great missing link in most thinking — and doing, for that matter — about conservation and use of agrobiodiversity. Genebanks around the world usually have reasonably well-established links with national agricultural research systems, but hardly any contact with extension workers, except maybe when it comes to germplasm collecting. Thats a pity, because extension systems would be valuable at all stages of the conservation-use continuum, from monitoring genetic erosion to targeting collecting to identifying breeding objectives to facilitating the evaluation and adoption of improved varieties.

The problem is that is public agricultural research is under-resourced and dysfunctional in many countries around the world, extension has, if anything, fared even worse. But that doesn’t mean that people dont have any good ideas about how to fix it.

A new KIT publication I saw announced today, for example, looks at the generally positive African experience with outsourcing agricultural advisory services to the private sector. And an IFPRI study reviews the recent reform of the Indian extension service, and also finds good things to say about the increased role of the private sector on the supply side, together with a more participatory approach to planning and implementation on the demand side.

It remains to be seen whether such macro-level changes will result in better linkages among researchers, extensionists and genebanks on the ground. I suspect it will take a major initiative to educate all three sectors in the need to work better together.

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Better harvests through chemistry

From the blurb at Eldis for a document entitled Fertiliser subsidies and sustainable agricultural growth in Africa: current issues and empirical evidence from Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya.

It is argued that there are compelling rationales for “smart” fertiliser subsidy programmes in Africa. However, achieving these benefits depends greatly on how the programmes are implemented. The authors assert that the contribution of fertiliser subsidy programmes to reducing poverty and hunger would be higher if they could be designed and implemented so as to:

  • target households with little ability to afford fertiliser
  • target areas where applying fertiliser can actually contribute to yields
  • promote the development of a commercial fertiliser distribution system rather than undercutting it

Not sure where I stand on this, to be honest. Fertilizers can be very good news, of course, but if they’re based on fossil fuels then a priori they are not likely to be sustainable. There has to be an overall move towards boosting soil fertility in other ways, making use of nitrogen fixing crops, green manures, bio-char, animal wastes and so on. But in the meantime, if you are going to use fertilizers (as I suspect you must) then those seem to be good policy prescriptions.

The full document is here.