Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
USDA has made available a whole bunch of time-series agricultural data for China, at both national and provincial levels. Truly amazing stuff, some of it going back to 1949. Here’s the trend in peanut production in Anhui province for the past 25 years.
One of the tricks that I think advocates miss, on both sides of the North-South divide (if such a divide really exists), is to make common cause. The fact is, agricultural biodiversity is vital to us all, as are most of the topics that float around it. It isn’t just poor rural farmers who are losing local biodiversity, or who possess that mystical indigenous knowledge. Everywhere is local somewhere. And everybody has knowledge. That seems to be a bit of a temporary mania for me right now, but here’s another example, from a blog called Dadtalk.
[T]he West seems intent in burying it’s own historical and tribal knowledge of local biodiversity. Sure, you can find books describing dozens of forgotten herbs, barks and seeds, but do you really know what to do with them? How much Indian knowledge of local plant and animal varieties have been lost for good? What has been lost by the burning of the Amazon and displacing of their native communities? The same is happening in Africa and other Asia nations as well.
The thing is, how to make use of these insights?
Someone called Mythili, in the US, has been inspired by a conversation with her ((I know, stereotyping, but …)) grandmothers to concoct a series on traditional small grains of India. Mostly recipes, although she may be gathering other kinds of traditional knowledge too from her grannies. Be interesting to see where Mythili’s blog goes with this, but I think interviewing grandparents is a good way for children to get a feel for agricultural biodiversity.
Of course, if you don’t have the sort of relationship in which you can simply talk to older people (or, indeed, anyone) fear not. Help is at hand, in the form of something called an Earth Dinner. I kid you not. The helpful folks at Organic Valley have produced a set of cards you can buy that ask questions like “Describe a family recipe …” Could be valuable if someone were to collate all the results.
After The Economist, here comes mighty Foreign Affairs with a definite money quote:
Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn — which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year.
Here’s the article’s executive summary:
Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based ethanol is now all the rage in the United States. But it takes so much supply to keep ethanol production going that the price of corn — and those of other food staples — is shooting up around the world. To stop this trend, and prevent even more people from going hungry, Washington must conserve more and diversify ethanol’s production inputs.
I hereby lay claim to bio-temperance as a concept and predict big things for it.
A survey in the US has discovered that children eat more fruit and vegetables, and have a more positive attitude to those foods, if they have been grown in a home garden. That’s great, for children at homes with gardens. For the rest, school gardens can help:
“Students at schools with gardens learn about math and science and they also eat more fruits and vegetables. Kids eat healthier and they know more about eating healthy. It’s a winning and low-cost strategy to improve the nutrition of our children at a time when the pediatric obesity is an epidemic problem.”
I happen to think a garden is one of the finest teaching aides ever, but then, I’m biased.