Category: Valuation

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On the ground in West Bengal

In West Bengal, a penniless activist is preserving 542 local varieties of rice on a teeny farm. It’s an amazing story, as Josh Kearns tells it. He visited Debal Deb’s research station and blogged about it here.

Folk traditions that were widely practiced until just a few generations ago, such as valuing seeds in non-monetary terms and freely sharing resources, have been sacrificed under market culture. Since Debal gives his seeds away for free, he runs the risk of their not being appropriately valued; whereas, if a farmer takes out a huge loan to buy Monsanto’s HYV seeds and they fail to produce a satisfactory yield (or fail altogether, which happens frequently), he blames himself for being a lousy farmer rather than Monsanto for ripping him off.

Just one of the problems of taking care of crop biodiversity outside the mainstream. Kearns does not say that Deb is no ordinary agroconservationist. He’s a friend of a friend, as it happens, and has a PhD from Calcutta University and several published papers and a book to his name.

Still, Kearns reports that against the odds, Debal Deb is succeeding. And while that is good news, I do wonder what the next stage is. OK, so he and his crew are conserving and describing the varieties (to forestall a rights-grab). But there must be ways both to support that work and to make use of the biodiversity to improve lives.

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Kenyan community ranch wins UN award

A community ranch dedicated to wildlife and conservation has won the UN’s Equator Initiative prize of US$30,000. The Shompole Group Ranch offers a five-star eco-tourist experience and has made great efforts to increase wildlife on its 62,000 hectares, spreading the benefits to community members. But does the ranch also grow the food to feed all those wealthy tourists locally? The story does not say, and nor do the many web sites that tout Shompole ranch as a resort. OK, it is a dry area, but there is freshwater in two permanent rivers.

Meanwhile, just across the border in Tanzania, the President of Sacramento State University apparently pulled strings to enable wealthy benefactors to hunt animals — including endangered species — as trophies.

The common thread, of course, is that wildlife has value — dead and alive — and cashing in on that value may be the most important way for local people to benefit directly.