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Mapping agricultural biodiversity et al.

The new Information Development is out and it is a special issue on “GIS and Spatial Information for Rural Development.” You can read the abstracts of papers on, among other things:

  1. generating detailed crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa from much coarser input data  ((You, Liangzhi; Wood, Stanley; Wood-Sichra, Ulrike; Chamberlin, Jordan. Generating plausible crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa using a spatial allocation model. Information Development 2007 23: 151-159))
  2. “An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy” ((Chamberlin, Jordan; Tadesse, Mulugeta; Benson, Todd; Zakaria, Samia. An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy: expanding the range of available information for development planning. Information Development 2007 23: 181-192))
  3. a “Socio-Economic Atlas of Vietnam” ((Epprecht, Michael; Heinimann, Andreas; Minot, Nicholas; Muller, Daniel; Robinson, Tim. From Statistical Data to Spatial Knowledge — informing decision-making in Vietnam. Information Development 2007 23: 193-204)) 

This last is actually online, and well worth having a look at, although it is pretty huge to download.

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Tree domestication a huge success

There’s a heart-warming tale over at the Rural Poverty Portal (nice site, too) of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. A tree domestication project in west Africa has brought higher incomes and improved status for women, which has translated into schooling and better nutrition. Women are running their own tree nurseries, selecting which species to grow and nurturing them for market. So far the number of species is limited, perhaps that will improve. The project was implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre.

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San Francisco leads the way?

Victory Gardens in San Francisco aims to rekindle, kindle, ignite — I don’t know — some kind of wartime spirit by delivering a complete garden starter kit by tricycle. Well of course it’s wacky. But it might just take off, and it does promote agricultural biodiversity in an urban setting. Heck, they’ve even got their own seed bank, just like the big boys.

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Educated fruit

This story — EARTH University Bananas and Pineapples Arrive in Whole Foods Markets’ Stores in the Southeast — needs a bit of unpacking.

There is an agricultural university in Costa Rica called EARTH; Escuela de Agricultura de la Región Tropical Húmeda. EARTH was founded in 1990 on a former banana plantation, and has its own model banana farm. Also, two pineapple plots. It aims to teach a kind of ethical agriculture. Profits from the sales to Whole Foods Markets support scholarships and research and investment in pineapple production. The Southeast in the story refers to Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Even though Whole Foods Markets is an 800 lb gorilla, on balance this is probably A Good Thing.

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GI had no idea there was so much diversity

We know hardly anything about the differences among varieties of the same crop. Oh sure, we know what different varieties look like; that’s easy. But detailed differences in composition are hard to find. There are the classics, of course, like wetet be gunche sorghum in Ethiopia, whose name translates as “milk in my mouth”. It contains almost a third more protein than other sorghum varieties and, even more important, about double the level of lysine, a vital amino acid for human nutrition. And there are the red and black varieties of rice, which are known to be high in iron and other minerals and vitamins and which are traditionally used to treat anaemia, especially in pregnant women. (I have been unable to discover whether this treatment is effective, in a Western sense, but it seems entirely reasonable, and a bit churlish to deny it.) But in general, we know next to nothing about the nutritional qualities of varieties, as opposed to species.

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