Farmers in areas of Uganda are being asked to plant tea instead of sorghum. The government will supply subsidized seedlings and will open a processing factory that will buy the leaves. The main motive is that tea earns double the income of sorghum. That may be, and diversification is a good thing, but I wonder whether the income from tea will buy as much nutrition as the sorghum it replaces.
School project on peas
A brief post at Intercambioperu explains how schoolchildren at Corazon de Jesus have teamed up with Het Hof van Eden in the Netherlands to study the biodiversity of pea varieties. There’s not much more detail beyond that, but I’m hoping that they may share their progress and results. As we’ve noted before, school gardens offer a perfect environment to teach children about the importance of agricultural biodiversity and nutrition. I reckon there are also loads of opportunities to use diversity to teach all sorts of other subjects too, from human migrations to plate tectonics, to history to mathematics, and much more besides. Is anyone actually doing this though? And could we help in any way? Let us know.
I’d attempt to link the Peruvians to Bioversity International’s Cyber-Plant Conservation Project, but the server is down right now. When it is up I’ll try again.
Green Revolution 2.0
We’ve blogged before about reaction to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. A significant portion of the $150 million earmarked for the Alliance will go into improving crop varieties, using both conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. Two more takes on the whole thing came out today. Here, the great Ethiopian plant genetic resources conservationist Melaku Worede talks about what went wrong with the first Green Revolution, and what he fears will happen in Africa if the same thing is tried there. While here you can read about how high-placed politicians in Mozambique say the country is “striving toward a green revolution to improve and diversify agriculture and increase food production†and are putting their money where their mouths are.
P.S. Incidentally, the BBC World Service has a new series called “Feeding the World,” and the first programme is about the Green Revolution. You can download a podcast here.
Enset bags
Via Timbuktu Chronichles comes news that a Ugandan company called African Skin has won the Business in Development Challenge. African Skin makes attractive bags and other accessories from the outer layers of fibre of the enset plant (see also here for the role of enset in food security in Ethiopia), which can be sustainably harvested. “The Business in Development (BiD) Challenge is the first international business plan competition for entrepreneurship and development. The BiD Challenge offers entrepreneurs worldwide the opportunity to develop and execute business plans that improve living standards in developing countries at a profit.”
Wiki on climate change and biodiversity
We have been contacted by David Wiedenfeld with news of a wiki-style site with the objective of aggregating information about biodiversity conservation and climate change. It will mainly focus on wild biodiversity, but material on agricultural biodiversity will be welcome. You can find David’s wiki here. Sounds like a great idea, good luck with it!