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Battling risk

Here’s how Jeffrey Sachs starts a recent article in Scientific American:

Life at the bottom of the world’s income distribution is massively risky. Households lack basic buffers — saving accounts, health insurance, water tanks, diversified income sources and so on — against droughts, pests and other hazards. The bodies of the poor often lack enough nutrients to rebuff diseases. Even modest shocks, such as a temporary dry spell or a routine infection, can be devastating. 

He uses this platform to launch a plea for innovative forms of insurance, things like weather-linked bonds combined with other financial services for farmers. The Millennium Village of Sauri in Kenya has apparently been having some encouraging experiences with such instruments, and they certainly seem worth exploring and testing. Anything that helps farmers manage risk must be welcome.

But what about the best agricultural insurance policy of all? What about agricultural biodiversity, in all its guises? Not much — or any, in fact — talk about agrobiodiversity from Prof. Sachs, beyond that “and so on.”

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Legalize it?

We’ve blogged before about poppy-growing in Afghanistan. We have here a well-adapted, traditional crop whose cultivation is being — let us say — actively discouraged in its place of origin and highest diversity because of the illicit trade in its product. Meanwhile, the large legal demand for the product is serviced — but by no means fully met — by countries which are much better off and have lots of other options. Legalization and regulation, possibly combined with new varieties with a truncated biosynthetic pathway for morphine, would seem to be an attractive option, at least worth exploring.

Well, a long piece in the website of the US Department of State says no, emphatically. It seems that:

  • the licit market is not lucrative enough
  • there is not sufficient world demand
  • regulation is not feasible in Afghanistan
  • past experience in other countries is not encouraging, and
  • legalization is conterproductive anyway

Even the technological fix is no such thing, apparently. My first thought is that if all the money being poured into interdiction was directed at establishing a regulatory framework, and perhaps even providing subsidies, the whole thing might not perhaps seem so hopeless. Also, if historical experience of legalization is not particularly encouraging, is the experience of prohibition any more so? But it would definitely be worth getting to the bottom of whether there is a worldwide shortage of medical opiates or not. Anyway, see what you think.

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Cacao and conservation

A whole issue of the journal Biodiversity and Conservation looks at how cocoa production landscapes can contribute to biodiversity conservation. There are several papers on specific case studies and also an overview. Most of the discussion is — predictably — about what cacao cultivation can do for biodiversity, but, what about the other way around? The overview does suggest that

it is important to understand trade-offs between productivity and conservation and the economic costs of conservation friendly practices to land users so that more effective policies can be designed… Quantifying the benefits (both short and long-term) of biodiversity within agroforestry landscapes to farm productivity, for example via pest and disease control … requires attention.

What are these biodiversity-friendly practices? Here’s a few ideas, again from the overview:

  • eco-friendly certification
  • research and extension to increase productivity while maintaining diverse tree canopies
  • development of markets for non-cocoa products
  • payment for environmental services

As far as certification is concerned, the Fair Tracing Project may suggest solutions:

The Fair Tracing project believes that attaching tracing technology to Fair Trade products sourced in developing countries will enhance the value of such goods to consumers in the developed world seeking to make ethical purchasing choices.

I’ve just come across this project, and I don’t know much about it. A piece on its web site — basically a blog — about the ICT being used to trace fair trade coffee in Haiti did point me to a rather interesting example of a corporation trying to bridge the digital divide.

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Breadfruit overlooked

USAToday has done a nice write-up of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii, but, unaccountably, this does not even mention the work of the Breadfruit Institute, which is a department of the NTBG. I blogged about the Institute and Diane Ragone’s pioneering efforts in breadfruit conservation not too long ago. They really should get more exposure. But so should other NTBG work on cultivated plants, such as the restoration of the taro terraces at Limahuli, which are now used to grow various varieties of a number of traditional Hawaiian crops. There’s a photo of the terraces in the USAToday piece, but the text is entirely about wild plants. Important stuff, but why leave out the amazing work going on in agricultural biodiversity?

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New approaches to crop rotation

Many intensive farmers — and most gardeners — use diversity in time to improve their harvests. They change the crop growing on a particular piece of land from year to year. Legumes add nitrogen to the soil, which the following crop, perhaps a cereal, uses up. That’s the simplest rotation, and soybean-maize covers vast swathes of land. But with the increasing unpredictability of conditions, more complex systems may be more beneficial. Indeed, recent research suggests that a dynamic rotation, which draws on a larger selection of crop diversity and which changes the exact pattern of rotation depending on recent past events, may be the best option yet.

A symposium in 2005 heard reports from USDA scientists who had conducted experiments in dynamic cropping; that symposium has now been published in Agronomy Journal. Access is restricted, so I’m glad that Biopact has quite a detailed analysis, even though I cannot discover from its web site who is behind Biopact.