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New map of anthropogenic biomes

Professor Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Professor Navin Ramankutty of McGill University have come up with a new classification of the earth’s biomes. They call the new classes “anthromes,” or anthropogenic biomes:

Anthropogenic biomes are not simple vegetation categories, and are best characterized as heterogeneous landscape mosaics combining a variety of different land uses and land covers.

I would imagine this will be quite useful in mapping the distribution of individual crops and even crop varieties. The anthromes may be viewed in Google Earth. Here’s what South Asia looks like.

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And this is the area around Mexico City.

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Ethiopia and the ITPGRFA

Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC) has a nice new website. Interestingly, it includes an interactive feature called BioForum. I was surprised, however, to see no reference to the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) in the section on access. Since Ethiopia has been a Party to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture since 2003, IBC should be using the SMTA for transfers of Annex 1 material, surely.

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Carolina Gold

In the early 1700’s, rice was South Carolina’s main export — no wonder the variety grown was called Carolina Gold. But where did it come from?

The first reported import in the New World of what is thought to be Carolina Gold occurred in 1685, when a slave ship from Madagascar unloaded a cargo of rice in Charleston, South Carolina.

So was that Indian Ocean island the ultimate source of Carolina Gold? USDA geneticists think they know, and have written about it in a new paper. Anna McClung and Robert Fjellstrom looked for molecular markers for Carolina Gold among the material in USDA rice germplasm collection. The best genetic fit — confirmed by close morphological similarity — was actually with an accession from Ghana, not Madagascar.

Questions remain. Maybe material from Carolina — originally derived from somewhere else — found its way back to Africa.

But geographer Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.

Efforts are underway to bring this historical variety back into commercial cultivation.

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Monopsony

Thanks to our occasional contributor Jacob van Etten for the following article on markets and agrobiodiversity. 

Monopoly happens when there is only one seller for a certain product. Monopsony, this week’s new word, happens when there is only one buyer. And when this happens, it is also likely that this single buyer will impose some rigid standards. And then the industrial buyer makes fake diversity by making slightly different mixes of standard components:

One technique retail oligopolies use is flood the shelves with a pseudo variety of similar products made in almost exactly the same way, so that minor vendors that offer real variety can be elbowed out. The beer industry is a great example of this trend.

In other words, agricultural biodiversity is being replaced with industrial diversity. Monopsony is growing in the US wine market. If climate change will push wine production to the north, will Canadian and Swedish vineyards become planted only to the few grape varieties demanded by the monopsonists ((There was a nice map in the November 2007 French National Geographic that shows how viticulture will move northwards, based on data by Gregory Jones, whose home page has a number of interesting articles on this, but none as the NG map.))?

The role that markets play in biodiversity conservation as well as local food provision is also the subject of a recent article, published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability. The article is behind a pay-wall, but the PhD dissertation (in Spanish) on which it based and a colorful brochure are available for free.

Neus Martí and Michel Pimbert explain that in the Peruvian Andes, local communities organized barter markets to exchange local food products, while the economy of the region was pushed towards commercial agriculture. The barter markets permit a commercial exchange of agricultural products that is economically horizontal (between equals) and ecologically vertical (between ecological floors in the mountain landscape), whereas neo-liberal policy promote something that is the other way around.

The barter markets also happen to be good for biodiversity. All crops that are sold for money may also be bartered, but the reverse is not true. Many crop landraces and wild foods exchanged in barter markets are never sold in money-based markets.

So, don’t blame the market. Blame the monopsonists.

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A maize tour

SIRGEALC over, Marleni, David and I headed for CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre. That’s in Texcoco, about an hour’s drive from the hotel where we were staying in Mexico City (or three hours, unfortunately, on the way back). It turned out to be something of a maize odyssey. I’ll tell the story in pictures.

When we got to Texcoco, it was too early for lunch, but that didn’t stop us spending some time in the market sampling the local cuisine, as the quesadillas there are famous. This lady certainly made us some great ones. Note the two types of maize she’s using.

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