Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Our cartography nut is otherwise engaged, temporarily, but I know he’d love this one. Blue shows agricultural production consumed directly by people: food. Orange-red is consumed indirectly in processed products, mostly feed for livestock but also things like cotton and coffee. Notice anything interesting about the distribution? Yeah, me too.
Hat tip to Resilience Science, which gives links to the original study.
The ingratitude! Apparently villagers in the Uttar Kannada district of the Western Ghats in India have not been entirely truthful with the folks collecting information for the local Biodiversity Register. These registers have been promoted as a way of collecting local traditional knoweldge in order to protect against biopiracy and give local people some sort of intellectual property rights. But, like jealous cooks at a bake-off, some seem to withholding information.
“People have not given details of prescriptions, compositions and the methods used to cure ailments the traditional way using plants with medicinal properties. The information we have might be incomplete. In some cases, people have just mentioned plants but haven’t revealed how they use them for treatment.â€
That’s according to G M Bhatt, president of the Biodiversity Management Committee of Heggarni. Villagers say they fear that they will lose control of their knowledge and their resources, even if it is “protected” in a biodiversity register.
They may have a point. According to the report, when it was discovered that a local plant, Malabar tamarind (Garcinia gummigutta), contained a compound that could “cure obesity” it was rapidly overharvested and is now in short supply. (That could well be true; the GEF Small Grants Programme funds a project on the conservation and domestication of G. gummigutta.)
What I wonder is, where did villagers ever get the idea that their local resources might be open to overexploitation?
Tangled Bank 94 is up at Life before Death, full of biological diversity and goodness. Best part about it? The host is a bee-keeper! (I think I may have apiarist-envy.) She hasn’t actually posted on bees since 28 September, but it is winter so there can’t be all that much to write. I would love to have an expert’s view on the latest news on Colony Collapse Disorder in the US, which is that it is not the result of bees imported from Australia carrying a virus imported from Israel.
A comment on an ancient post about Moringa prompted two reactions. First, happiness that our page must be turning up in someone’s searches, tinged with sorrow that I don’t know of any financial partners to help protect the Congo basin with Moringa. Secondly, to ask what’s new with Moringa.
Not a lot at the site itself, but that’s probably because they’ve all been working to spread the word. And that word is that Moringa Leaf Powder is likely to be certified by the Food and Drug Board of Ghana, if they receive the necessary data. I hope that happens soon because it will offer an outlet and an income opportunity to all the people who have worked so hard to bring Moringa products to market.
But I confess I’m not all that happy myself with the designation of Moringa as “The Miracle Tree”. Sure it’s a good tree, and as Luigi said back then “really the adjective ‘multi-purpose’ could have been invented for this plant”. There’s all too much miracle silver-bullet style thinking around, and I would have hoped that, knowing the value of diversity better than anyone, the folks associated with Moringa would be less inclined to put all their eggs in one basket and all their faith in one tree.
Still, that’s quibbling. Snooping around on some other photos, I noticed the URL for the Environmental Development Youth Movement, which seems to be a key promoter of Moringa in Ghana. Fascinating site (especially if you like photographs of lots of packages) which has its own village and which seems to be doing good work. They’re looking for volunteers too. Say we sent you.
Photo by Armelle de Saint Sauveur
Good news, everyone. There’s money available from a programme called BiodivERsA ((No comments, please, on the beauty, or otherwise, of that particular name.)) You have to come up with a proposal for an international research project to:
Furthermore, it should have to do with biodiversity, and should link scientific advance to policy and practice. And it should include partners from other ERA-net countries. The online pre-proposal form will be available from next Monday, 10 December.
So you could, for example, decide to study the impact of european legislation on levels of agricultural biodiversity and then propose policy solutions that would increase the diversity farmers and others can easily make use of. But they’ll never fund you.
I wonder what they will fund.
Hat tip: Ecology and Policy.