Category: Threats

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Rice in Italy

40869585_bdcd1db3d8_b.jpg No, not Condy Rice seeing the sights: rice the crop, and its future in Italy. It may surprise some people that rice is grown in Italy, but it has a long history of cultivation in the Po Valley, and an important place in the local cuisine, as anyone who has eaten risotto will testify. Unfortunately, the ongoing drought in the region is causing severe problems for thousands of rice farmers (among others) in the Val Padana. Some people are saying that’s the shape of things to come, with climate change and all. But here’s an interesting juxtaposition of news: it’s been announced that the Slow Food Foundation for Diversity, based in Tuscany, is to start marketing in Europe a traditional, organically grown, Filipino rice known as “unoy.” Isn’t globalization wonderful?

Photo from ciordia9 on Flickr provided under a Creative Commons license.

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Swaziland takes to sorghum … and other crops

It is a mystery to me how a johnny-come-lately like maize in Africa (or for that matter tomato in Italy) can work its way into local consciousness to the extent that people not only consider it as their own but prefer it to things that actually perform better. In one small African country, Swaziland, that may be changing.

“My maize all died in the heat, or it was stunted and the cobs were so small they were only good to give to the cattle. But look at my sorghum! It is doing well,” said Nonhlanhla Thwala, a widow in Lubombo, the country’s eastern region.

The full story is in AllAfrica.com, and it is well worth reading. It seems a shame that it takes a drought and major crop failures to provoke people into reassessing their options and returning to the agricultural biodiversity they abandoned a few generations ago. But at least it is happening.

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Drought resistance

A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.

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Perk up people, it’s about your survival

Someone called Bradford Plumer, whom I had not previously come across, has a longish post asking why people don’t seem to care about the ongoing mass extinction and wishing that more writers on the subject “would really hammer home why humans should care about the loss of biodiversity”. Funnily enough, he couches his entire argument in terms of natural processes and ecosystems and what their collapse might mean. And he quotes agriculture, and especially monoculture, exclusively as problem, not solution. But the only example he gives of the sort of example that might might “get people to perk up” is the possibly looming pollination crisis caused by a shortage of bees.

Until there is a wider understanding that agriculture is part of nature, and not separate from it, and that we humans are far more dependent on the food providing services of agriculture than on any other ecological service, I doubt that there’s going to be much perking up anywhere.

There’s not a lot of understanding of that in Brad’s posts or the comments on it, but I live in hope.