So here’s the situation. The world of industrialized food feeds corn to cattle, and then works to stop the cattle burping because it is worried about global warming. And the world of biofuels holds out the promise of endless ethanol from a feedstock of cellulose in grasses. What if we fed the corn to the ethanol plants and let the cows convert the cellulose into meat (and methane)? A neat conceit from Tom Konrad, whose post A Modest Proposal For the Future of Ethanol: Cellulosic Beef is full of interesting facts on the whole biofuels farrago. Hat-tip: Gristmill.
Small forest enterprises are big
From IIED, a report on the International Conference on Community Forest Management and Enterprises, held in Acre, Brazil in mid July. Most of the item is about IIED’s own contribution, about small forest enterprises, which are more dependent on, and better for, forest biodiversity. But there is a summary of conference outcomes and links to fuller reports and other useful organizations.
Mapping agricultural biodiversity et al.
The new Information Development is out and it is a special issue on “GIS and Spatial Information for Rural Development.” You can read the abstracts of papers on, among other things:
- generating detailed crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa from much coarser input data ((You, Liangzhi; Wood, Stanley; Wood-Sichra, Ulrike; Chamberlin, Jordan. Generating plausible crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa using a spatial allocation model. Information Development 2007 23: 151-159))
- “An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy” ((Chamberlin, Jordan; Tadesse, Mulugeta; Benson, Todd; Zakaria, Samia. An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy: expanding the range of available information for development planning. Information Development 2007 23: 181-192))
- a “Socio-Economic Atlas of Vietnam” ((Epprecht, Michael; Heinimann, Andreas; Minot, Nicholas; Muller, Daniel; Robinson, Tim. From Statistical Data to Spatial Knowledge — informing decision-making in Vietnam. Information Development 2007 23: 193-204))Â
This last is actually online, and well worth having a look at, although it is pretty huge to download.
Tree domestication a huge success
There’s a heart-warming tale over at the Rural Poverty Portal (nice site, too) of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. A tree domestication project in west Africa has brought higher incomes and improved status for women, which has translated into schooling and better nutrition. Women are running their own tree nurseries, selecting which species to grow and nurturing them for market. So far the number of species is limited, perhaps that will improve. The project was implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre.
San Francisco leads the way?
Victory Gardens in San Francisco aims to rekindle, kindle, ignite — I don’t know — some kind of wartime spirit by delivering a complete garden starter kit by tricycle. Well of course it’s wacky. But it might just take off, and it does promote agricultural biodiversity in an urban setting. Heck, they’ve even got their own seed bank, just like the big boys.