People power

Here’s another potpourri, this one centred on local people’s perceptions of agricultural biodiversity. From the journal Livestock Science comes a paper looking at how traditional livestock keepers in Uganda select breeding bulls and cows among Ankole longhorn cattle. Another paper, this one from Crop Protection, discusses how Ethiopian farmers rank sorghum varieties with regard to their resistance to storage pests, and indeed what they do about such pests. And finally, from The Hindu newspaper, news of an initiative, to be launched on the International Day for Biological Diversity by the Kerala State Biodiversity Board, for a “people’s movement” to “prepare a database of all living organisms and traditional knowledge systems” in Kerala. The initiative is part of the state’s draft biodiversity strategy and action plan, which apparently includes consideration of agricultural biodiversity.

New kids on the blog

The International Food Policy Research Institute seems to have a blog: blog world hunger. It started a while ago, by the look of things, but has lately shaken itself, rubbed the sleep from its eyes, and started wandering about the room. Alas, it needs a tweak or two. I tried to leave a comment and no matter how fast I typed it insisted my message had timed out as a result of inactivity. Maybe you’ll have better luck. There’s an ongoing discussion of agriculture and shifting climates, which seems appropriate today.

Growing grains

Blogger Mustard Plaster has decided to delve into the magic of growing cereal grains with hull-less oats and hull-less barley. She complains that there isn’t much advice on gardening books, and she’s right. As one who has been there and done that, I can recommend only one book: “Small-Scale Grain Raising” by Gene Logsdon. And to tell the truth, even that is not much use for the gardener, although it is a fun read. Freshly ground, home grown cereals; that would take a lot of beating at breakfast time.

Happy International Day for Biodiversity

Yup, it’s the day we wait for each year. The day that the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has set aside to celebrate. And this year, it’s all about Biodiversity and Climate Change. Yay! We learn that an increase of only 2.5 degrees C will mean “50 million more people facing hunger” and that “conserving certain species such as mangroves and drought resistant crops can reduce the disastrous impacts of climate change effects such as flooding and famine”.

If you were looking for more on biodiversity and agriculture, look no further. Our friend Andy Jarvis, along with colleagues Annie Lane and Robert Hijmans, has published a paper looking at how climate change will affect the survival of crop wild relatives in three species: peanut, cowpea and potato. There’s a press release here (and coverage in Reuters). Bottom line: things don’t look good.

Climate change affects agriculture from at least two directions. It will require diversity as a sources of traits to cope with the effects, by breeding new varieties. And yet it threatens that very diversity with extinction, especially when, like the peanut, you can move your seeds less than a metre each year in search of more suitable growing conditions.

Two solutions present themselves, which is a nice symmetry. Try to ensure that natural conservation efforts in parks and the like are designed with wild relatives in mind, giving slow-coaches like the peanut a helping hand if necessary. And collect more samples of agricultural biodiversity from the wild and from farmers’ fields to store in genebanks. Alas, this latter option has become more and more difficult as countries increasingly fear the rip-off tactics of bio-pirates. And who’s to blame for that? Step forward the CBD.

It’s an ironic world, eh?