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ni-Vanuatu get traditional

I don’t know how I missed it. Having just finished a longish stint in the South Pacific, I still try to keep up with what’s going on down there, but the fact that 2007 is the “Year of the Traditional Economy” in Vanuatu totally slipped through my net. ni-Vanuatu are wonderful, friendly people and this sounds like it’s going to be fun. I’m sorry I’m not there (or nearby at any rate) any more, I would probably have tried to link up with some of the planned activities, as agricultural biodiversity seems to be very much on the agenda. Here’s one of the things that people are being encouraged to do, for example:

Each family and community to feed more pigs and chickens, plant more and/or larger gardens, plant more yams and taro, plant more fruit and nut bearing trees, plant more trees for making canoes and tamtams, plant more pandanas trees and plant more of other traditional foods and resources not listed here.

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Selecting forages

You may remember a longish post sometime back describing a piece of software called LUCID which can be used to prepare multi-access keys for the identification of species or varieties. Well, I’ve recently come across a slightly different use to which LUCID can be put. Normally you would enter into the software what each species looks like — the length of their petioles, colour of their flowers, shape of their pistils. What if, instead, you put in how each species performs under different conditions — of altitude, precipitation, soil pH, salinity, management etc.? What you would end up with is a tool for selecting which species would do well under specified combinations of conditions, or for specific purposes. And that’s exactly what a consortium of organizations interested in forages for the tropics has done. There are also factsheets on each of several dozen tropical forage grasses and legumes, including photographs and maps of suitable geographic areas.

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Opiate demand, meet opiate supply

A bumper harvest of a traditional, well-adapted crop for which there is a huge international market has led to the resignation of a government minister. Meanwhile, other countries — where livelihoods are, shall we say, less precarious — benefit. There’s so much irony there, it could be a case study in modernist narrative. I know I’ve said it before, but if it wasn’t tragic, it would be funny. Legalize it, already!

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Small farms and diversity

IFPRI has an interesting paper out called The Future of Small Farms for Poverty Reduction and Growth. It makes the point that agricultural development must reach smallholders if it is to have any impact on poverty, and to reach them “the policy agenda … must change to meet the new challenges facing small farms: improv(ing) the workings of markets for outputs, inputs, and financial services to overcome market failures.”

Fair enough, I suppose, but the thing that got me was the almost complete failure to address agricultural biodiversity. Surely there are differences between small and large farms in the biodiversity they maintain. Surely there are differences between small and large farms in their reliance on diversity. Surely there are differences between small and large farms in the role that diversity can play in lifting the families that work on them out of poverty. Maybe, but you won’t hear about it here. Pity.

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The geography of rice

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Robert Hijmans has a great new global map of rice cultivation out. Robert is at IRRI now, hence his current preoccupation with rice, but he’s done the same thing for several other crops, and of course there are his cool cartograms too. I guess it is his map that underlies the figures of the potential impact of climate change.

Of course, this is a snapshot. How cultivation of a crop changes over time is difficult to capture in a single image, but there’s a map which does a pretty good job for maize.