Crop national parks?

A new publication by WWF and some friends at the University of Birmingham ((Food Stores: Using Protected Areas to Secure Crop Genetic Diversity. A research report by WWF, Equilibrium and the University of Birmingham, UK. Written by Sue Stolton, Nigel Maxted, Brian Ford-Lloyd, Shelagh Kell, and Nigel Dudley. Published August 2006, WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature)) makes the case for using protected areas, in particular in the centres of origin, to conserve genetic diversity in crops and their wild relatives:

Many of these centres have only five per cent protection, some have only one per cent or less. They include: the Central Andean wet puna of Peru and Bolivia, well known as reservoirs of grains and root crops including the potato; the Eastern Anatolian deciduous forests and steppe of Iran, Turkey and Armenia, centres of diversity for many grains and fruit species; the Southern Korea evergreen forests important for their genetic resources of tea; and the Malaysian rainforests which are centres of diversity for many tropical fruit species, particularly mangoes.

Reasons to be green: drink

I wonder how many pesticide residues make it from grain ethanol past distillation into liquor? Still, there may be other reasons to favour an organic tipple, like the fact that it encourages biodiversity. Good greens have also given up bottles, and corks, in favour of plastic boxes. But if the drinks industry doesn’t use corks, there’s almost no reason to preserve the groves of cork oaks. And plastic boxes can’t be recycled. Or can they? It’s enough to make my head spin.

Uganda: grow your own biodiesel

Readers of the Sunday Monitor in Uganda were treated this morning to a long article about Jatropha carcus, a shrubby tree whose seeds contain 40% oil that can be made into biodiesel. The piece is extremely thorough, giving a mass of numbers about Jatropha and pointing out that it can deliver multiple benefits as part of agroforestry systems. Hand presses can keep production local. The seedcake, after pressing out the oil, is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and so can be returned to the farm to boost soil fertility. Intercropping suggests that it need not detract from food production. Uganda currently spends US$ 230 million on diesel imports.

An open letter to Kofi Annan

Dear Mr Annan

Congratulations on your appointment as Chair of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. In your inaugural lecture in Capetown you said categorically that the Alliance would “work with farmers using traditional seeds known to them”. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “traditional seeds,” especially in view of Agra’s strong focus on breeding: “we will develop improved varieties for the full range of Africa’s important staple food crops,” it says on the Agra web site.

Maybe you just mean “not genetically engineered”. That might make sense, because the sentence before the one on “traditional seeds” reads: “We in the Alliance will not incorporate GMOs in our programmes.”

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“Sensually mapping the world”

An article by Andrew Jefford over at the Financial Times’ Food and Drink section dissects the concept of “appellations d’origine controlée.” This refers to a system which provides legal protection for a name of an agricultural product made in a particular way in a particular place. Thus, champagne is not just any old sparkling wine, but, “wine produced by a special method, from pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay grapes grown in a circumscribed region of France lying east of Paris.”

The article is a great read. Here’s a longer sample, to give you the — as it were — flavour:

Thanks to the efforts of some 250 local growers with 9,000 ha of meadows irrigated by the river Durance via an intricate series of canals in place since the late 17th century, even hay from the stony Crau plain achieved certification, in 1997, to protect and expand the reputation of this uniquely sweet, nutritious animal feed; only these growers have the right to tie their bales with a distinctive red and white twine. The hay is cut three times every summer, the first cut being ideal for horses and beef cattle, the second cut for dairy cattle and milking ewes, and the third for sheep and goats… Appellations are a way of sensually mapping the world.

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