Category: Policy

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Millennium Villages

There was a long piece in the Sunday Standard yesterday on one (in fact, the first) of the so-called Millennium Villages, Sauri in Siaya District, Western Kenya. An initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University launched in 2004, the Millennium Villages project aims “to demonstrate how the eight Millennium Development Goals can be met in rural Africa within five years through community-led development.”

The Millennium Village effort is explicitly linked to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and addresses an integrated and scaled-up set of interventions covering food production, nutrition, education, health services, roads, energy, communications, water, sanitation, enterprise diversification and environmental management. This has never been done before.

Twelve villages were chosen in sub-Saharan Africa: these were all located in hunger hotpots, but different agro-ecological zones. The Sauri experience seems to be very positive, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly what sort of agricultural interventions have been tried. Maize yields have gone up dramatically, but why exactly? Better access to fertilizers (because of subsidized prices) is probably one reasons, though “fertilizer trees” (for more on these, see this separate piece from SciDevNet, which coincidentally came out a couple of days back) and other nitrogen-fixing species seem to also have been tried to improve fallows. A detailed report mentions indigenous vegetables, but little else in the way of agrobiodiversity-related interventions (or indeed baseline information) as far as the crops are concerned. A pity.

The BBC has some pictures of Sauri here.

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Biodiversity still valuable for medicines

Nature is still supplying more than two-thirds of all “new chemical entities” that end up approved as drugs, according to the third in a long-term series of studies by David Newman and Gordon Cragg. Their scientific study of drugs introduced between 1981 and mid 2006 is online here. The study also reveals that 2004 saw the lowest number of new drugs introduced since 1981. According to New Scientist magazine, which reports on the study:

“The dip was due in part to the international Convention on Biodiversity rules covering exploitation of natural resources, says Danna Leaman of the World Conservation Union’s medicinal plant specialist group. She says that the Convention, signed in 1992, has increased the bureaucracy and cost of getting people into the field to collect plants for drug discovery.”

The scientists and reporters conclude that diversity is a vital and extremely valuable resource in the search for blockbuster drugs. And so it is.

My real problem with this whole approach is that it fails to disentangle agricultural biodiversity, and as a result countries think that their agricultural diversity is going to produce the same pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. But while drug companies may discover their billion-dollar blockbusters in plants (and occasionally animals) they don’t harvest them directly. They mimic and alter the drugs and find ways to make them under their control. Agriculture is not like that. Genetic resources find their way into new varieties and breeds, which are then commercialized. But the amounts involved are nothing like those in the pharmaceutical world, and yet that’s the backdrop against which people discuss agricultural bio-piracy. Here’s hoping that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture does indeed ease access and share benefits, as it is intended to do, and that the flow of genetic material starts up again in earnest.

While we’re on the subject of lumping all biodiversity together, another academic study has produced a biodiversity map of the world. While a press release and a report or two mention ecosystem services, they don’t tell us to what extent the scientists examined either agricultural species or the genetic diversity within those species. And I have not yet been able to get to the scientific study to find out.

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Visualizing data

Stop press: Google bought Gapminder yesterday. Thanks Patchwork Planet. Still no sign of any good Ag data though.

Google has started hosting Gapminder, a wonderful tool for visualizing development data developed by a Swedish NGO. Here’s an example of what you can do with it. Worth playing around with. But to see a master at work, check this out. There are only a few variables at the moment, but wouldn’t it be great if one day the data in FAOSTAT were to be added? Anyone want to volunteer to do the mash-up?

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Accessing biodiversity in Brazil

Brazil has new procedures in place (called Sisbio) to issue licences to collect biodiversity for teaching and research, according to an article on SciDevNet. They are supposed to make the whole access system much easier to navigate. And faster: what used to take up to two years should now take 45 days at most. This bit struck me in particular:

Scientists will eventually be able to use Sisbio to access satellite images of potential research areas and gauge research activity in areas so they can better plan their research.