Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The cacao community is meeting in Ghana under the sponsorship of Mars to draft a plan for sustainable cacao farming in Africa:
Topics on the table range from multifunctional agriculture, genetics and germplasm, to pest and disease, and science and leadership.
I hope they will also consider the kind of value-adding that is being discussed at the just-opened annual Paris chocolate show.
Whenever I hear people talking about reviving food traditions, I always want to ask them what they’re doing with expatriates. They are often the people who are most attached to traditional foods and assorted agrobiodiversity from back home. Take my wife. No sooner did our visitor fly in from Nairobi, laden with uji mix,
that she had the stuff boiling away on the stove as if she hadn’t tasted porridge in years. 1
Now, I’m not saying that Kenyans abroad are going to save finger millet cultivation in the Nandi Hills or whatever. But they might be a good place to start.
The other day, Luigi suggested investing in watermelons now that the credit crunch has made banks go bust and stocks worthless. Hold on. Maybe the watermelons will also go belly up, as the BBC reports that we are also heading for an eco-crunch. This unwelcome news is based on The Living Planet Report, produced by the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network. “The global footprint exceeded the earth’s biocapacity by 25% in 2003, which meant that the Earth could no longer keep up with the demands being placed upon it.”
I am torn. Yes, we are depleting our resources. Yes, it is scary. But this is also déjà vu all over again. The predictions made in Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, and many other gloomy predictions from the 1960-70s, have turned out to be incorrect. Human creativity has outsmarted perceived physical limits; but there are real physical limits too…. Have we really reached them?
In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Not a strange prediction given the famines that occurred in the years before the book was written. But it never happened; we got the Green Revolution instead.
Food shortages, or at least high food prices, were all of a sudden back on the front pages this year. Is the end near then? Not yet. Now that speculators are retreating, and farmers have responded to higher prices by producing more (25% more wheat produced in Europe! Perhaps largely because the ‘set-aside’ subsidized fallowing policy expired?). Food prices are tumbling again. For how long?
Terralingua’s Global Source Book on Biocultural Diversity is out and available for download as a pdf. And very impressive it is too. It looks at “worldwide experiences in an integrated approach to sustaining cultures and biodiversity” through some 50 or so case studies, of which one, from Peru, is on agrobiodiversity. Better than nothing, I guess.
The latest Berry go Round — Number 10 — is up at 10,000 birds, whose proprietor, Mike, definitely gets it:
I love plants. You do too, whether you’re in touch with your vegephilia or not. Everything you eat or smoke and practically everything you drape on your body or put in your car to make it go derives directly or indirectly from the vegetable kingdom.
And for once, I’m not going to winge about the paucity of agricultural interest. There’s masses. Neglected species, citrus taxonomy, wild relatives, recipes, the whole enchilada. Check it out.