The Slow Food movement is evolving, its founder says: “People who sniff a cheese and talk about how it has the most wonderful aroma of horse sweat. Think how incredibly boring we would be if we were still just a gastronomic society.”
Neocolonial land grab?
Sue Branford writes in The Guardian that:
China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels.
A couple of days ago, Luigi mentioned in a footnote of a post on Malagasy coffee, that Daewoo is to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar. Apparently to produce maize. The Financial Times reported:
“It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar,” said Mr Hong [of Dawoo]. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.
There might be some scope for agricultural expansion on the Malagasy high plateau, but 1.3 million ha of good arable land that is untouched? Except by the local population, of course.
Not quite, and not so fast, responded the government:
The contract (…) concerns only the facilitation of a land search. We are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares … It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue.
Grain has a report, and a Google notebook with clippings.
FAO’s Jacques Diouf talks about neo-colonialism. There is also this Guardian article on resentment in Laos. Expect more of that to come.
A big picture
If everyone shifts trophic status to roughly herbivore level, and we educate all the world’s women to secondary level, we have a chance.
The difference between 12 billion and 9 billion people in 2050 is one child per woman. If all the world’s women were educated to secondary level, fertility would drop by about 1.7 children per woman. And we can probably feed 9 billion herbivorous people, if we can maintain the crop diversity of the major grain crops high enough to avoid catastrophic disease outbreaks.
Read more from Steve Carpenter at Resilience Science.
Nibbles: Radishes, Fungi, Genomics, Bagel, Eels, Barack Hussein, Pomegranate
- Vavilov does radishes.
- “How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
- “The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
- “The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
- “He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
- “Activists” buttonhole Obama.
- The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.
Nibbles: Food, Potatoes, Medicine, Bees, Beer, Food miles, Fungi, Fruits cubed
- “Food is the most cost-effective intervention.”
- Peru promotes potatoes.
- The Importance of Biodiversity to Medicine. Anyone got access? Any mention of nutrition?
- EU Says bees should rest. Problem solved.
- Extreme beer. All problems solved.
- Eat local? I don’t think so.
- Itchy Italian gourmands gutted over climate change-caused truffle troubles.
- Mulberry trees pay the price for immodesty.
- While fig trees planted by Jesuits survive. It’s a funny old world. Fruit tree trifecta in play.
- And it comes in! Today’s saving-the-frigging-English-apple story comes to you from The Guardian. Enough already, the English apple is going to be fine.