Swedish TV has recently shown a series of four programmes on global environmental change called “The Planet.” There’s an accompanying website, and from the blog Resilience Science now comes news of an English-language version. The aim of the website is to “enhance public awareness and knowledge about the Planet and our future, to show the limits, threats and possibilities we are facing today.” So what? Well, unusually for this kind of thing, there’s actually (some) material on agriculture! The website is in Flash, so I can’t link to the actual bit, but just click on the circle labelled “Earth” and you’ll get there. There’s other interesting stuff too.
Tiger wine
Here’s an interesting way of adding value to an agricultural product: take rice, make rice wine, then soak tiger carcasses in it. Not everyone approves.
Flowering trigger uncovered
Some clever genetic manipulation has led scientists to identify the chemical that allows daylength to trigger flowering in plants – all plants, it looks like. It is the protein produced by the gene called Flowering Locus T, or FT. This means that crop beeders will now have a better shot at developing varieties which will flower at different latitudes, useful as climate zones shift due to climate change.
China data
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.
Making connections
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?