Seed aid: an implementer’s view

We’ve briefly blogged some of the coverage received by a recent paper showing that in an emergency giving farmers seeds to plant may not be as effective as giving them vouchers or even money to exchange for seeds to plant. But in our never-ending quest to give voice to the people who really know their stuff, here’s the experience of Maylee Thavat about a project intended to give Cambodian farmers access to high-quality rice seed. It’s a fascinating, albeit somewhat worrying, read.

What I’d really like to know is what the experts with experience think of the FAO’s recently announced plan for $1.7 billion to give seeds (and fertilizer) to poor countries’ farmers. Is that really what those farmers need?

Maize in Africa

An article in the latest Economist discusses the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme. There’s been a fair amount in the media about this lately, and in particular about whether the bumper maize harvests of the past couple of years can be attributed to the extra fertilizer ((Incidentally, there’s an interesting NY Times video on what the rising cost of fertilizers means for farmers in the US.)) now finding its way onto farmers’ fields increasingly sown to modern varieties, or just to better rains. I think the jury is still out on that one, but check out this statement from the piece in The Economist:

…local seed varieties, little altered from those first brought by the Portuguese centuries ago…

I don’t know about you, but I think that rather underestimates the power of natural selection, drift and recombination. Not to mention 500 growing seasons’ worth of painstaking selection by twenty generations of African farmers.

Round and round the beer flows

After four days away from the intertubes, I’m astonished to be sent from a beer blog in Philadelphia, via a very local paper in that town, to a brew roundup in Burkina Faso, where sorghum is the starting material of choice. It’s a good, colourful write-up that makes it clear how important beer is in the everyday life of Zogore. And Philly. And yes, I know I need to get over it, but the sheer range of stuff out there continues to delight.