Seen in one small convenience store by the roadside in Shanhua: rice and peanut milk, soy and mung bean drink, and almond and fish snack. All mainstream products in fancy packaging. Maybe it’s just that these are unfamiliar combinations, but it seems to me that we’re not nearly as good in the West at mixing and matching our agricultural biodiversity. By the way, there was asparagus juice too. I tried them all, and they were all pretty good.
A coffee journey
Sometimes you come across a story that illustrates so many of the themes of agrobiodiversity conservation that it’s almost too good to be true. I have it on very good authority that the one I’m about to tell you is indeed true, though. The authority is the former head of the genebank at the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza in Costa Rica (CATIE), who is now the head of the genebank at The World Vegetable Centre (AVRDC) in Taiwan.
He told me the story over coffee at the Trees Wind cafe in Tainan City, a short ride from AVRDC’s headquerters. The story is about the coffee he was drinking. I was drinking a very superior arabica from the highlands of Taiwan. But that’s another story, or at least a different aspect of the story. The coffee my host was drinking is called Geisha and it comes from Hacienda Esmeralda in Panama.
He discovered it by chance at Trees Wind when he first moved to AVRDC a year and a half ago and was exploring the surroundings. The name jumped out at him from the menu because he knew it from his days managing the CATIE coffee collection. The owner of Esmeralda had visited the CATIE genebank some years back, looking for coffee germplasm to try out. He’d been growing coffee for decades, having originally got his material from CATIE, but he was now expanding into a higher altitude plantation and wanted new varieties to try. He settled on an accession called Geisha. Nothing to do with Japan, though: this is an Ethiopian landrace, very low yielding, but very high quality; and from the right sort of altitude.
My host didn’t hear much after that about how the material he sent out to Panama fared. Not until, that is, he sampled a cup of the stuff in Tainan some years later. And an expensive cup it is too: 225g of beans will set you back TWD 1800 (USD 56). Coffee is now also grown in Taiwan, along with tea. The stuff I had was great, and about a third of the price of Geisha from Panama, though on a par with interesting brands from Ecuador, Ethiopia and Indonesia.
So, material collected in Ethiopia probably back in the 70s by an international FAO mission, conserved at a regional research institute in Costa Rica, grown in Panama, marketed around the world, and finally sipped in Taiwan by people whose stimulant of choice was quite different until fairly recently, in competition with material from a dozen other countries on three continents. Quite a journey. Quite a lesson in agrobiodiversity interdependence, conservation and use.
Where the (European) buffalo roam
Again from Michael Kubisch.
The European bison or wisent, like its North American counterpart, has faced near extinction during its recent history. Both species have been brought back from the brink starting with relatively small populations — in the case of the European bison perhaps with fewer than 50 individuals. The wisent population now numbers somewhere over 3000, but these animals suffer from low genetic diversity and are furthermore separated into a relatively large number of often very small and isolated herds. This is problematic because it is thought that the survival of a species depends on a minimum number of breeding individuals, although there isn’t necessarily much agreement on what that number needs to be.
There is consensus, however, that the fractured nature of the European bison population is unlikely to guarantee its long-term survival. What is needed is a larger breeding population containing perhaps as many as a thousand individuals. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary for these animals to belong to a single contiguous population, as long as smaller populations exist on stretches of connected land that enable them to come into contact with each other. But even that requires suitable land and lots of it — not an easy quest on a crowded continent.
But there is hope. In a recent study described in the journal Conservation Biology, a multinational group of researchers has determined that the Carpathian Mountains could provide a possible habitat for a wisent metapopulation. This area already contains a number of smaller herds, has the type of vegetation wisent seem to like and (in part thanks to a decrease in human population pressures), and consists of relatively large tracts of suitable land. Implementing this idea would obviously require both existing herds to be enlarged and new ones to be established. Whether the means can be found to accomplish this is hard to predict, but there is no doubt that it would constitute a significant step towards preserving one of Europe’s most magnificent herbivores.
Speaking truth to Slow Food
Slow Food is against standardization, right? Slow Food is for diversity, right? Well, sort of. That is certainly the rhetoric, but a paper by Ariane Lotti in Agriculture and Human Values ((Lotti, A. (2009). The commoditization of products and taste: Slow Food and the conservation of agrobiodiversity Agriculture and Human Values, 27 (1), 71-83 DOI: 10.1007/s10460-009-9213-x)) suggests that the practice can be rather different.
Lotti, who’s something of an insider, analyzes one of Slow Food’s projects in detail and comes to the conclusion that the organization is not as “alternative” as it claims, or believes itself to be. How can it be, when its imposition of production standards mimics the food system it purports to undermine? How can it be, when its taste education efforts can exclude “not-so-good-tasting foods…, potentially eliminating a part of the agrobiodiversity and associated processes that Slow Food is trying to save”?
Too harsh? A paragraph from the conclusion is worth quoting at length.
It may seem as if I am expecting Slow Food to do the impossible and protect agrobiodiversity while not engaging the structures of the conventional system, not creating a market for its exceptional products, and not trying to convince people of the importance of taste in the food decisions they make. Rather, I have tried to do something the organization has so far ignored; I have tried to take a critical look at the ways in which Slow Food attempts to achieve its mission and the effects of its activities. This is lacking in Slow Food and other alternative agriculture organizations, perhaps because a critique is often assumed to be a threat to a movement’s fragile existence. Without a critical examination of an organization’s activities, however, unintended and potentially negative effects are overlooked.
And of how many similar — and not so similar — organizations could something similar be said! Lotti longs for a middle way — no Cartesian dualist she.
…the binary of fast food and slow food ignores how the two extremes are related within the same agriculture system. This relation, in the case of the Slow Food organization, does not lead to a combination of the two to create what Mintz (2006, p. 10; emphasis in original) refers to as “food at moderate speeds”; that is, foods with the availability of fast foods and the characteristics of slow foods.
To truly fulfill its potential Slow Food needs to stop thinking of itself as somehow apart from — above — the conventional food system. Referring to the Basque pig keeper who was the subject of her analysis, Lotti points out that…
Pedro is not just a producer of Slow Food Presidium pigs and meats; he is a protector of global diversity and genetic resources. The industrial pig farmers, when they find themselves in a genetic corner with only conventionally-bred pigs to work with, turn to farmers like Pedro. The industrial pig is tasteless, and when the participants of the National Swine Improvement Federation Conference decide that they want to provide consumers with a “positive taste experience,” they go to farmers like Pedro, who raise non-industrial pigs, to look for taste (Johnson 2006, p. 54).
Closer attention to context and a critical, reflexive look at its efforts will “help the organization engage, address, and challenge more effectively the structures that undermine the continued production of the diverse catalogue of breeds and varieties with which it works.”
Will Slow Food slow down for a moment and listen?
Nibbles: EoL, Mixed farming, Conservation medicine, Indicators, Vitamin A, Hamburger, Rewilding, Tejate
- Did you know the Encyclopedia of Life does crop wild relatives?
- Smallholders with mixed crop and livestock systems are the key to it all. My mother-in-law says: I agree.
- Deforestation is bad for the health.
- 2010 Biodiversity Indicator Partnership launches National Biodiversity Indicators Portal.
- Aussies trial a new, secret orange spud. Yeah I can really see that being a huge success.
- The McItaly kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like your stomach after you’ve eaten one.
- The “rewilding” kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like those herds of wildebeest roaming majestically across the Great Plains.
- Rewilding an ancient pre-Hispanic drink. Ooops, I guess that should be reviving.