- Climate change threatens tropical insects and their pollination services.
- Brazil rises in world genebank rankings.
- Food price crisis advice summarized.
- Cuba “sustainable” agriculture at crossroads.
- Supermarkets bad for small farmers?
Seed aid: an implementer’s view
We’ve briefly blogged some of the coverage received by a recent paper showing that in an emergency giving farmers seeds to plant may not be as effective as giving them vouchers or even money to exchange for seeds to plant. But in our never-ending quest to give voice to the people who really know their stuff, here’s the experience of Maylee Thavat about a project intended to give Cambodian farmers access to high-quality rice seed. It’s a fascinating, albeit somewhat worrying, read.
What I’d really like to know is what the experts with experience think of the FAO’s recently announced plan for $1.7 billion to give seeds (and fertilizer) to poor countries’ farmers. Is that really what those farmers need?
Nibbles: Ecotourism, food aid
- Community tourism sounds like fun: “feeding pigs, planting vegetables, harvesting fruits.”
- Norman Borlaug says USAID should buy food aid locally.
Nibbles: Trees, AGRA, pig meat, culinodiversity, fund raising, seed, data
- Let them eat leaves: farmers to plant trees in Kenya.
- For the archives: Rockefeller Foundation’s original blueprint for A Green Revolution for Africa (PDF).
- Keeping it real, computers and genetics monitor Iberian ham.
- Eat diversity to conserve it.
- Three-headed coconut tree for sale. To you, one million bucks.
- Video on FAO seed project in Afghanistan. I just hope somebody’s taking care of the landraces.
- Scientists exhorted to geo-reference. IRRI GIS staff unavailable for comment.
Behind the behind the high food prices stories story
This is important. We’ve blogged a little about high food prices, and we’re keeping an eye on the subject ourselves, especially where it gives us the chance to bang on again about the role of agricultural biodiversty. But it isn’t a mainstream theme here, not least because there are so many other sources. Still, good though those resources may be, many are not able to give the long-term background to why things, notably subsidies, are the way they are. So, here’s a guest post at the ever-informative Gristmill, which lays bare some of the reasons that lie behind the distorted market for commodity crops.
[H]ow did we get here? How did our modern, abundant, and affordable food system run aground? In a sector that is global in reach, absolutely essential (we must eat, after all), and includes the politics of saving family farms and ending hunger, there is no simple, singular answer. A lot of it has to do with economics and politics. Most of it has to do with what goes into making a box of cereal, and why we even have boxed cereal.