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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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Farmer Field Schools in the Pacific and beyond

Danny Hunter has sent us this contribution. Until recently, Danny ran the TaroGen and DSAP projects at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Fiji. Thanks, Danny.

An interesting article from SciDevNet about farmer empowerment through Farmer Field Schools (FFS) reminded me of a great little programme that we had running in Samoa in the late nineties.  Farmer Field Schools began as a training and extension approach for integrated pest management of rice, largely supported by FAO in Asia. Since then FFS have been used for a variety of agricultural crops, systems and problems, including livestock, and have spread to other regions of the world.

The article prompted me to reflect on earlier efforts that we made at the Alafua Campus of the University of the South Pacific in Samoa, using similar “field-based” approaches to help students and farmers (as well as researchers and extensionists!) learn about taro diversity and improvement. In 1993 Samoa was devastated by an outbreak of taro leaf blight. Initial responses using pesticides and cultural methods were futile and while introduced “resistant” varieties helped, the disease was still a major problem.

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Bamboo galore

The latest issue of FAO’s NWFP-Digest seems to be joining in with the celebrations of the 10th birthday of the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR). In addition to the International Bamboo & Rattan Expo in Guangzhou, China (see map), it points to a new technique from India for rapid bamboo propagation, the manufacture of bamboo bicycles in Ghana, the sale of bamboo socks in the UK and the planting of bamboo in Bhutan. There’s lots of other stuff too, though.

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Bee shortage? What bee shortage?

An article in the New York Times this week suggests that the current scare over colony collapse disorder is nothing extraordinary. It has happened before and will probably happen again. What has been missing from the debate, some scientists say, is historical context. Records show that colonies were vanishing in the 19th century, when the cause was seen as lack of moral fibre. Bees that weren’t returning to their hives had “weak character”. And it happened in the late 1970s, when it was called “disappearing disease”. The disease too disappeared, and no cause was ever isolated.

One day we may know, and extra money for long-term monitoring (none has been forthcoming) may help. In the meantime, if the “crisis” has helped people appreciate the importance of bees as pollinators, and prompted deeper investigations, then that is surely A Good Thing. To prove the point, two deeply fascinating papers have been published in the past month showing that genetic diversity in honeybees and other social insects is also A Good Thing.

This is counterintuitive, because the reason social insects are social is that they are genetically uniform.

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Rescuing the American chestnut

You know, these Nibbles (the short, soundbite-type things which appear at the top of the right sidebar of this page) are fun to do, but sometimes you end up downplaying, or over-simplifying, an important, interesting — and interestingly complex — story. Take what I said about the American chestnut a few days ago. The recent history of Castanea dentata is proud and tragic ((Looking further back, it also played an important role in native America agroforestry.)), and efforts to bring it back from the brink of annihilation well-nigh heroic. To imply, as I did, that these efforts were confined to hybridizing the American with the Chinese chestnut was justified only by the necessity for extreme brevity. In fact, of course, it is not just hybridization but repeated back-crossing. And not just interspecific crossing but also painstaking crossing among the few remaining pure American chestnuts, as reported in the article that prompted me to revisit the original story and hopefully make amends for my earlier flippancy.