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A pleasant surprise: musician backs agricultural biodiversity

It isn’t every day that listening to a music report provides blog-fodder. A podcast on music from National Public Radio in the US produced an item on a singer called Adrienne Young, apparently “a darling of the folk-bluegrass-country set”. What’s different about her is her very public commitment to small-scale (and organic) farming, community-supported agriculture, and agricultural biodiversity. She grew up in a fruit & veg farming family, has worked on farms, and invites local farmers to speak at her shows. The music’s OK too.

There are a couple other musicians with an agricultural bent. Willie Nelson has his Farm Aid, although that has always struck me as a handout to small farm families who haven’t managed to cultivate subsides. Ali Farka Touré, who died a little more than a year ago, was famously a farmer. And the CGIAR centres once had Hootie and the Blowfish as ambassadors to yoof. (What do you mean you’ve never heard of either entity?)

There must be others, and there must be ways that music could be used to convey the message of agricultural biodiversity. Enlighten us, please.

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Kofi’s time

In 2002, while UN secretary general, Kofi Annan asked, “How can a green revolution be achieved in Africa?” After more than a year of study, the appointed expert panel of scientists (from Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa and elsewhere) replied that a green revolution would not provide food security because of the diverse types of farming systems across the continent. There is “no single magic technological bullet…for radically improving African agriculture,” the expert panel reported in its strategic recommendations. “African agriculture is more likely to experience numerous ‘rainbow evolutions’ that differ in nature and extent among the many systems, rather than one Green Revolution as in Asia.” Now Annan has agreed to head the kind of project his advisors told him would not work.

That extract is from a long and thoughtful piece on the web site of Foreign Policy in Focus, an American “think tank without walls”. It is a response, as you might have guessed, to the appointment of Kofi Annan as head of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

If you have any interest in the problems of poverty and agriculture in Africa, I urge you to read it. This is not shrill propaganda. This is carefully considered commentary. Carol B. Thompson, the author, makes several trenchant points that, to me, skewer the rationale behind the Gates/Rockefeller strategy. (Not that I was in favour before, as regular readers will know.)

They say that generals are always fighting the previous war. Alas, the same seems true of the war on poverty.

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Down memory lane

I suppose if you blog long enough eventually you’ll end up re-visiting old stories. That happened quite a lot today.

First, there was a post I wrote a few months back about how mesquite — a useful source of food and other products in some places — is proving a nuisance in northern Kenya. Well, according to a story out today in the East African Standard, the government has been taken to court over the introduction of the plant, but is shifting the blame to FAO.

Then, you may recall a couple of posts about Brazil nuts and more generally nuts in Brazil. Today I ran across a paper ((Karen A. Kainer, Lucia H.O. Wadt and Christina L. Staudhammer. Explaining variation in Brazil nut fruit production. Forest Ecology and Management, 2007.)) which followed fruit production in 140 Brazil nut trees over 5 years. ((Clicking where it says map below this post will take you to where the Brazilian researchers work: Rio Branco, Acre)) What struck me was that there was significant variation in fruit production from year to year for individual trees, but that some trees are consistently high producers. I don’t know if there’s a Brazil nut improvement programme, but if there is it should definitely know about those! There are also management practices that are likely to increase production, such as cutting lianas and adding P.

Third, an editorial and article in Nature about the use of systems biology ((“The study of the interactions between proteins, genes, metabolites and components of cells or organisms”)) to evaluate traditional Chinese medicines reminded me that I’d written on that subject too. What is fascinating about Chinese traditional medicine is that it is based on diversity: it doesn’t deal in single chemicals taken singly, but rather in often incredibly complex combinations of a myriad plant and other products. A particular species will often play quite different roles in different formulae aimed at different symptoms.

Finally, I mentioned about a month back a piece of work ((Eric Giraud et al. Legume Symbioses: Absence of Nod Genes in Photosynthetic Bradyrhizobia. Science, 2007)) on an often overlooked but very important subset of agricultural biodiversity — microsymbionts. A longish article yesterday in EurekaAlert on the same work (I don’t know why the delay) made me realize I had been excessively cursory at the time of my original post. The researchers have identified a totally new genetic mechanism controlling the way nodulation happens, which opens up the possibility of interesting agricultural applications.

One of the things this little flurry of retrospection has done is alert me to the fact that some of the links in older posts may now be broken, for example because after a certain period of time the piece gets put into an archive behind a paywall. Not sure what we can do about that, though.

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A policy for pastoralism in Africa?

The African Union apparently launched a Pan-African Pastoral Policy Initiative at a conference at Isiolo in northern Kenya last week. There’s a little bit about the event on the website of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Pastoralist Communication Initiative (one of the organizers), but not much. An article summarizing some of the results was released a few days ago by the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks and got picked up by various agencies. But that’s all I’ve been able to find. Which is a pity, because listen to what the IRIN article says:

The key issues that emerged from the discussions included: governance; land; education; markets and financial services; conflicts; and poverty risk and vulnerability. Another point was the ‘biological dimension’ – feed resources and animal genetic resources.

There’s nothing about biodiversity in the African Union pamphlet introducing the policy initiative, but it sounds as though that may have been rectified during the meeting itself.

The IRIN article is very good, full of pithy quotes and interesting information, like this:

A concept note prepared by the AU and OCHA-PCI on the continental policy framework quotes UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2005 figures, which indicate that the continent has 235 million cattle, 472 million goats, 21 million pigs and 1.3 billion poultry, all valued at US$65 billion.

I did look for this concept note but sadly couldn’t find it online.