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Women’s Institute saves the apple

All this musing about worlds and grains of sand lately actually goes back to a discussion I had with Jeremy a few days back about whether or not it was worth nibbling a little piece on the apple fair which will take place this Sunday in the Millennium Orchard at Beverley Parks Nature Reserve in Long Lane, somewhere in East Yorkshire.

More than 40 varieties of apple are growing on more than 100 trees in East Riding Council’s 50-acre countryside attraction.

Unusual East Yorkshire varieties include the Hornsea Herring and Fillingham Pippin, which was found only in the Swanland area.

The council’s countryside access officers and members of the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI) joined forces to develop the orchard as a millennium project.

Worthy enough, but too parochial, Jeremy said. (Although he did in fact relent in the end.) And he’s quite right. English apples, for all their diversity, are not going to save the world like ones from Kazakhstan just might. And East Riding Council is hardly at the forefront of agricultural biodiversity conservation science. Fair enough. But I wonder if the Talgar Pomological Gardens in Kazakhstan and the Garrygalla Research Center in Turkmenistan might not have something to learn from the humble efforts of the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes.

And vice versa, of course.

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Compare and contrast

Sure, we live in a globalized world, a global village. Recent events in the financial markets are somewhat painful reminders of that. But that doesn’t mean things are the same everywhere, or even going in the same direction. High(er) altitude farming is alive and well in Nepal, as Jeremy just noted. But on its way to extinction in England. Better irrigation is boosting rice yields in Cambodia. While karez wells are being abandoned in Afghanistan. That’s one reason why I don’t believe the genetic erosion meta-narrative. There is always an exception. And although you can sometimes see the world in a grain of sand, it’s better to look at the beach.

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Calling Colorado State University locals

Rebecca Nelson, who researches improving disease resistance in crops, will be the speaker at the ninth annual Thornton-Massa Lecture at Colorado State University at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, in the Lory Student Center Theatre. Her topic is “Science vs. Hunger: The Challenges of Funding Research in International Agriculture,” and it would be great to get a report here.

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Reflections on Barcelona

Danny Hunter has some thoughts on whether IUCN takes agricultural biodiversity seriously over at his Rurality blog. IUCN has been meeting in Barcelona, and Danny was there telling everyone about the Crop Wild Relative Global Portal. The money quote:

There still appears to be a massive disconnect between the global conservation and agrobiodiversity communities.

LATER: There is, of course, no consideration of agriculture in the latest work on Key Biodiversity Areas, apart, that is, from seeing it as a threat.

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A landscape to marvel at

pokhara.png

That image took my breath away when I saw it a couple of days ago. It shows rice terraces north of Pokhara, Nepal. The caption to the picture said that the economy of Nepal is based on agriculture,

“which employs 80 percent of the working population and accounts for 41 percent of the gross domestic product of one of the world’s poorest countries. Generations of farmers have tamed the mountainsides and prevented erosion by cutting terraces. Rice paddies thus rise in tiers as high as 9,800 feet (3,000 m) above sea level, covering 45 percent of Nepal’s cultivated land.”

The photo was one of almost 40 at a wonderful site called The Big Picture at boston.com. Two or three times a week Alan Taylor assembles a portfolio of outstanding photographs from around the world. This time they were by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who has developed a wonderful technique of photographing nature and humanity from the air.

Many of the pictures that The Big Picture showcased depended for much of their impact on agriculture, and the patterns that human interference creates on the ground. This particular one caught my eye for two reasons. First off, it is very, very beautiful. Secondly, Pokhara is a famous name among some agrobiodiversity nuts (such as myself). I’ll explain in a minute. So, I made a note to come back and blog the story here when I had a moment. Imagine my horror, then, when I headed over to The Big Picture and found this note:

At the request of the coordinator of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s upcoming exhibit, the number of photographs displayed here has been reduced to ten.

Pokhara had vanished. Yikes! That’ll teach me to procrastinate. But, knowing as I do the Dark Side of the Web, I simply assumed that someone, somewhere, would already have stolen it, and I was right. Lock, stock and barrel, the entire sequence of 38 images had been scraped by a nefarious site (to which I will naturally not link). They’d even had the gall to put their own credit on the image, a matter of minutes to excise. So, saved, by evil. 1

Which brings me to the importance of Pokhara. The farmers there have been working with a local NGO called LI-BIRD and with Bioversity International to develop a local landrace of rice. After a concerted effort to find and then assess hundreds of versions of the landrace, the farmers came up with an improved version that was eventually registered with the Nepalese authorities as a “proper” variety that can be sold. That may not sound like much of an achievement, but take it from me: it is. But I had never seen the agricultural landscape in which this work was undertaken. Now that I’ve seen Arthus-Bertrand’s picture, I’m even more impressed.

You can read about Pokhareli Jethobudho at the web site of Bioversity International and at the International Development Research Centre in Canada, one of the donors that supported the project.