The Perthshire Advertiser reports on efforts in that neck of the woods to preserve and revitalize old orchards and the varieties they contain. I didn’t know this, but the Carse of Gowrie (which sounds like an ancient honorific title but is, in fact, a stretch of land north of Edinburgh on the north side of the Firth of Tay) is an ancient centre of fruit-growing in Scotland. A joint effort by local authorities and others has conducted a survey and is examining ways of making more of the remaining old orchards — 28 of 51 have already been lost — and their trees. There’s a meeting on 30th January. If anyone there is reading this, we’d love to know more.
Gates Foundation doubles aid for agriculture
Bill Gates announced new awards for agriculture totaling US$306 million. This doubles the amount committed to agriculture, and includes US$42.8 over four years to Heifer International. Interesting in light of the impact of “improved” cows on local livestock breeds. There’s also money for AGRA to improve soil health, to CARE for dairy farmers in Bangladesh, and to TechnoServe to help East African farmers get more for their coffee. The Foundation’s press release is here. New York Times article.
Animal Genetic Resources on the ground in Uganda
A dying breed. Huge article in the New York Times magazine that looks at the general issue of disappearing livestock diversity through the particular lens of cattle in Uganda, where the local Ankhole cattle are threatened by high-yielding but fragile Holsteins. All the arguments and counter-arguments are there in a well-written piece that pulls no punches and yet, in the end, left me wondering what the solution is. Farmers who do use Holsteins profit thereby, setting off an arms race among fellow farmers, whose primary victim is the local livestock breeds. But when trouble strikes, in the form of drought or civil strife, it is the local breeds that gallop back to the rescue. As long as they remain alive …
Time for a test?
A few things have come together at the same time in that serendipitous way that makes me value even more the pattern detecting abilities of dear old Homo sapiens. First, I blog a feature that takes quite a close look at what the Gates Foundation is trying to do with (for?) agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Then I read a post from Marcelino over at Biopolitical arguing that the best way to help the poor may be to give them money. And finally, Karl over at The Inoculated Mind, introducing our post on high-carotene maize, says this: “Grrr, the opposition to humanitarian efforts such as golden rice sure gets my blood boiling … perfect for this weather”.
And I think, hmmmn, I feel a hypothesis creeping up on me.
Let’s go back first to Marcelino. He quotes Robin Hanson, an economist, who says:
A suspiciously large fraction of people who claim to care about the third world poor believe that the best way to help is to pursue their favorite hobby or career, and not to just give the poor money. Medical researchers seek disease cures, computer folk build laptops or subversive software, musicians hold concerts to inspire donations, policy wonks lobby governments to build schools, and so on.
That certainly seems true of the Golden Rice effort. The reasons it is unlikely to help the third world poor are many. Even the new improved version does not contain very much in the way of vitamin A precursors; you would have to eat an awful lot of it each day — probably an amount impossible to ingest in a day — to overcome the levels of malnutrition seen among the poorest children. The people who need it most are not going to be able to afford it — indeed, they are often out of the cash economy completely. And as for giving them seed and expecting them to grow it, their effort would probably be much more successful ploughed into more diversity in their fields and in their diets. Dark green leafy veg and orange fruits could make a much greater contribution than golden rice.
So the idea that Golden Rice was created, or given away, to help the third world poor does seem a little far-fetched. At the very least, the idea wasn’t thought through very carefully.
Then there’s the Gates Foundation’s support for agricultural research, which to me on the outside often seems to be suspiciously like using the previous generation’s weapons to fight the generation before that’s battles. Now, Gates wants results, and he wants impact. So, why not let two (or more) methods fight head to head?
Take two villages, or even two countries. Give one a bunch of cash to spend with scientists and others solving problems in a genuinely participatory way, trying some weird stuff (like agricultural biodiversity) along the way. For the other, put the usual advice to work in the usual ways. Give them both, say, five years. Then see which has improved most.
Simplistic, I know, but what, actually, is wrong with the idea? Smart people (not just me) are criticizing current approaches with sensible suggestions. Humour them, listen to them, do the experiment; then one way or another we’ll know. And smart people, as opposed to those who merely have an axe to grind, will change their opinion based on the results.
Something like this could have been tried with the Millennium Villages, but as far as I know it hasn’t. I wonder what would happen if you created the equivalent of a voucher system for research and development, and gave poor people in rural areas a choice of how to use their vouchers.
Strange fruit
I must admit that what I liked best about this recent post over at BoingBoing was not so much the idea of concentrating conservation efforts on animals that “have few close relatives on the tree of life and are often extremely unusual in the way they look, live and behave, as well as in their genetic make-up” — although that IS pretty cool — so much as the photo of the weird salamander. And, indeed, that there is an International Cooperation Network for Giant Salamander Conservation. But then I got to thinking about which species one would choose if one was going to do something similar for crops. What crops have few relatives and are just plain strange, for whatever reason? The artichoke? The caper? Buckwheat? The coconut? Send in your vote…