Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I’m OK with the idea of there being a diversity of calendars around the world. New Year, after all, should fall at some reasonably meaningful time, like right after the winter solstice, or around one of the equinoxes. Or, as in Ethiopia, around the end of the main rains.
Today.
To celebrate, the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity Conservation has a long article celebrating and explaining Enkukatash. That word means Gift of Jewels. The article explains a few of them.
I spent an interesting hour or so with Elcio exploring an open-air fruit and vegetable market in central Sarajevo last week. I think it is the very same market which was tragically attacked during the war with much loss of life. No sign of that now, thankfully, except for a memorial to the victims.
You can see some pictures of the fruit and vegetable diversity on display on my Flickr page. Here I just want to point out two curiosities. Or at least they were to me. Here’s the first.
This lady is selling necklaces of dried, perhaps immature but certainly small, okra fruits, called bamia in Bosnian (and indeed in Arabic for that matter). They are soaked in water and vinegar for a few minutes, then added to fried onions and meat to make a local stew. Or that’s what a lady buying some told us. I bought some and will try it. I’d never heard of okra being used in this dried form.
The second thing that came as a surprise to me was this fruit. Sorry I don’t have a decent picture of it being sold in the market.
Clearly some kind of Physalis, perhaps P. alkekengi? It was being sold a few fruits at a time, so probably for medicinal purposes (LATER: or as ornaments?) rather than food. I couldn’t communicate with the lady selling it, the only one in the market. Any ideas?
A SciDevNet piece on the report “Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots” says that
The report, commissioned by CARE International and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), identifies Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and Pakistan as countries particularly vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.
But actually, looking at the map on page 26 from an agrobiodiversity conservation point of view, the countries I’d target — for germplasm collecting, for example — are Mozambique, Madagascar and Vietnam. The authors looked at flood, cyclone and drought risk. These countries are in for all three.
LATER: At least Cuba doesn’t seem to be at much increased threat, which is just as well!
Sharron responded to my thoughts on extension in Africa with this remark:
Sounds like the kind of work Peace Corps volunteers have been doing for decades.
Not quite. Peace Corp volunteers do wonderful work, but in essence they parachute in and often, though by no means always, apply solutions that are not necessarily entirely appropriate to the situation in which they find themselves. What is needed is local people, locally trained, but exposed to a world of experience among similar farmers facing similar obstacles. Agreed, we don’t yet know how to fund this sustainably, or exactly how to establish the e-aspect of it. But those details could be worked out, with a will.
Meantime, here’s a little video interview with Getachew Tibuket, whose Farmer Field Schools have trained something like 25,000 farmers in Ethiopia. I’ve no idea what they are trained to do, but it sounds like a useful approach.
Other examples welcome.
Spent the whole week in Sarajevo for a meeting, but did get a chance to explore on Friday morning. Doing so, I stumbled on the Sarajevo Bee-Fest: lots of stalls with people selling all kinds of different local honeys, other bee products, and bee-keeping equipment. No sign of worry about colony collapse disorder.
