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Extending extension

I have a thing about extension. I believe it is the great missing link in most thinking — and doing, for that matter — about conservation and use of agrobiodiversity. Genebanks around the world usually have reasonably well-established links with national agricultural research systems, but hardly any contact with extension workers, except maybe when it comes to germplasm collecting. Thats a pity, because extension systems would be valuable at all stages of the conservation-use continuum, from monitoring genetic erosion to targeting collecting to identifying breeding objectives to facilitating the evaluation and adoption of improved varieties.

The problem is that is public agricultural research is under-resourced and dysfunctional in many countries around the world, extension has, if anything, fared even worse. But that doesn’t mean that people dont have any good ideas about how to fix it.

A new KIT publication I saw announced today, for example, looks at the generally positive African experience with outsourcing agricultural advisory services to the private sector. And an IFPRI study reviews the recent reform of the Indian extension service, and also finds good things to say about the increased role of the private sector on the supply side, together with a more participatory approach to planning and implementation on the demand side.

It remains to be seen whether such macro-level changes will result in better linkages among researchers, extensionists and genebanks on the ground. I suspect it will take a major initiative to educate all three sectors in the need to work better together.

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Better harvests through chemistry

From the blurb at Eldis for a document entitled Fertiliser subsidies and sustainable agricultural growth in Africa: current issues and empirical evidence from Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya.

It is argued that there are compelling rationales for “smart” fertiliser subsidy programmes in Africa. However, achieving these benefits depends greatly on how the programmes are implemented. The authors assert that the contribution of fertiliser subsidy programmes to reducing poverty and hunger would be higher if they could be designed and implemented so as to:

  • target households with little ability to afford fertiliser
  • target areas where applying fertiliser can actually contribute to yields
  • promote the development of a commercial fertiliser distribution system rather than undercutting it

Not sure where I stand on this, to be honest. Fertilizers can be very good news, of course, but if they’re based on fossil fuels then a priori they are not likely to be sustainable. There has to be an overall move towards boosting soil fertility in other ways, making use of nitrogen fixing crops, green manures, bio-char, animal wastes and so on. But in the meantime, if you are going to use fertilizers (as I suspect you must) then those seem to be good policy prescriptions.

The full document is here.

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La Zucca

That early stirring of globalization that was the Columbian Exchange changed Italian food and cooking forever. That’s well known. What would pizza be like without pomodori and peperoncini, after all? There’s also polenta — and pasta e fagioli. And no doubt also traditional potato-based dishes, though I can’t think of one just now. But the third member of the Mesoamerican Trinity is often forgotten when the usual suspects of the exchange are trotted out, as I’ve just done.

Which is a pity, because the pumpkin features in some pretty nice dishes. 1 So it was nice to see it celebrated last week in Tolentino. We found this sculpture in the piazza which houses the regular fruit and veg market.

On the wall is the text of an ode to the vegetable (or fruit, but I’m not going there) by the local poet Giovanni Sebastiani (1874-1959). You can read “La Zucca” here. But don’t ask me to translate. The local Marche dialect is all but impenetrable to me.

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Mash-up

There’s an article in the latest Science entitled Celebrating Spuds. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to join in the celebrations. But even if you were, I’d suggest settling down with John Reader’s new book Propitious Esculent instead. I fancy myself moderately well informed about the potato but Reader served me with plenty of interesting new tidbits in addition to the usual fare. He has a terrific knack for putting things in context and for managing to take you off on detours so interesting that you hardly notice that you’ve deviated from the straightforward path. The silver mines of South America, for example, may well have been fuelled by potatoes, but the entire social set-up goes well beyond the potato as fuel and illuminates much of the Spanish conquest. Likewise, his very personal reminiscences of life in Ireland in the 1960s help to bring the great famine into perspective. His discussions of various food price crises in history is especially interesting today. When English farmers decided to abandon crops and instead grow sheep for wool, riding a boom in prices, there were riots in the streets over high prices for bread. Sound familiar?

The one thing I didn’t find, and that may be because my memory is playing tricks on me, was a discussion of a mad scheme by a Geoffrey Pyke, a wonderful Englishman who is sadly all but forgotten. After World War II Pyke wrote a series of articles outlining the benefits of using teams of cyclists to haul railway wagons around Europe. He calculated that the energy in food, and the efficiency of human muscle, made this a far better bet than expensive fossil fuels. In my memory, the calculations were all based on feeding the teams of cyclists potatoes. But Wikipedia says it was sugar, and Wikipedia is never wrong. The articles were in the Manchester Guardian of 20, 21 and 24 August 1945. Alas, I can’t find those pages online, so I can’t check. But why would I have remembered potatoes if it really was sugar Pyke was talking about?