There’s an extremely long and detailed piece in Business Daily Africa about what Kofi Annan really said, what he meant, and what other people think he meant, and what should have said about the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and GMOs. It really does have the whiff of theologists discussing a papal pronouncement. One thing the article does is to draw attention to all the other things — roads, markets, communications — that Africa needs to become more food secure. But just as I’m guilty of treating Africa as a monolith, so the article, and the multitude of experts it cites, are guilty of treating crops and genetic engineering as monoliths. Instead of worrying about the fine nuances of words like “consider” — as in “the Alliance will not shy away from considering the potential of bio-technology in reducing hunger and poverty” — maybe the assembled experts could consider specific crops and specific biotechnologies.
Nutrition news from the Antipodes
What do these fruits have in common: Kakadu plum, Illawarra plum, Burdekin plum, Davidson’s plum, riberry, red and yellow finger limes, Tasmanian pepper, brush cherry, Cedar Bay cherry, muntries and Molucca raspberry? Five points if you said “They’re all native Australian fruits”. Ten points if you said “According to this press release I just read, they’re exceptional sources of antioxidants identified in research published in the journal Innovative Food Science & Emerging Technologies”.
Ten points to me.
Farming butterflies conserves forests
East African farmers are making good money — and conserving their local surroundings — by going after butterflies. The Manila Times picks up a story from Agence France Presse reporting from the villages in Kenya and Tanzania where locals have learned how to trade in butterflies. The article is built on the words of the farmers themselves, and it makes for uplifting reading. A sample:
“I would be foolish to cut trees,†says Suleiman Kachuma, a 42-year-old villager, who earns between 15 and 23 dollars a month from his work with Kipepeo, double what he used to make selling timber.
“Before, people had a few chickens and goats… Now there is a big change. Farmers have more chickens, some even have some cattle. The project really changed our lives,†he says.
I thought I’d seen this somewhere before, and I had.
Turning biofuels on its head
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.