Category: Tourism

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100 things I’ve done: agrobiodiversity edition

You may have come across the “100 things I’ve done” meme. Jeremy succumbed to it, and a lot of fun it was too reading about it. I’ve just come across a somewhat more specialized version, by a geologist. Maybe there’s room for an agrobiodiversity version? If so, here are ten things that I think should be included, off the top of my head. I haven’t done them all, but I hope to, some day.

  • Harvest (or buy in the supermarket) and then prepare and eat a dish of traditional leafy greens in Africa.
  • Botanize crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent.
  • Talk cassava cultivars with the inhabitants of an Amazonian village.
  • Take part in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony at the coffee field genebank near Jimma.
  • See volunteer sweet potato seedlings being protected in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
  • Visit the Vavilov Institute.
  • Walk through a milpa at harvest time.
  • Look at potato varieties and wild relatives around Lake Titicaca.
  • Visit the Ifugao rice terraces.
  • Make the pilgrimage up to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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Mautam!

Once every 48 years, forests of the bamboo known as Melocanna baccifera go into exuberant flower in parts of northeast India. And then, like clockwork, the event is invariably followed by a plague of black rats that spring from nowhere to spread destruction and famine in their wake. For the first time on film, NOVA and National Geographic capture this massive rat population explosion in the kind of vivid detail not possible in 1959, when the last invasion occurred.

Sounds like a must-watch. Via.

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Nibbles: Berries, Women, Marsh Arabs, Maple, Sorghum, Nuts, Conference, Banana

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Hawaiian agrobiodiversity memories

I came across an evocative little piece in The Garden Island on Sunday, thanks to a Google alert. It’s about an upcoming course on permaculture design that will be looking in depth at the ahupua’a, the old Hawaiian practice of land subdivision and management.

To ensure adequate space for forests and agriculture in each ahupua’a, pre-colonial Hawaiian communities applied careful land-use planning. Valley floors, where the most fertile soil is concentrated, were reserved for agriculture. They often included walled-terraces developed to grow kalo (taro), the most important staple food crop for Hawaiians. Houses were built on hillsides and in sandy areas in order to save prime agricultural lands. As contemporary Kaua’i attempts to move towards more self-sufficient communities, we can look towards this model of reserving prime agricultural lands for agriculture to perpetuate our ability to feed ourselves.

The piece reminded me of a visit I made with the family to the Limahuli Garden and Preserve on Kaua’i. It’s a beautiful place, explicitly organized around the ahupua’a concept.
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And it even maintains small collections of different varieties of local root crops such as taro and sweet potato. Which was mainly why I was there. Although the visit came too late to allow me to include the data in the directory of Pacific collections. Maybe the next edition…
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Nibbles: Indigenous knowledge, Buffalo, Wheat rust, Cassava, New Green Revolution, Environmentalism, Millennium Seedbank, USDA, Pig