In honour of Valentine’s Day, albeit a day late, a chocolate-flavoured post today. First, from the great Howstuffworks, How Chocolate Works. Then, ever wondered where you can get the best hot chocolate in New York or Paris? Well, wonder no longer, and check this out. And finally, news that a network has been established to conserve cacao diversity. You can read the Bioversity International press release here.
Dual-purpose weeds
Two stories today about different ways of looking at the same plant. I was walking along a fairly major road in a suburb of Nairobi this morning and I noticed a “jua kali” artisan selling interesting-looking stuff. “Jua kali” is Kiswahili for “under the sun” and is commonly used hereabouts to refer to the informal sector, because under the sun is where most of them transact their business, as in this case. Anyway, I ended up buying the magazine rack pictured here, for about US$15.
The frame is metal, but the rest is made of a tough-looking fibre I couldn’t place. I asked what it was and was very surprised to hear that it is water hyacinth. That’s a very cool use for a noxious weed, which is again choking up Lake Victoria, after a successful biological control effort. It turns out that making furniture out of the stuff is not all that uncommon.
And here’s the story of the mesquite bush in Kenya, a useful plant in some parts of the world (even used as food in some cultures), but seen as a terrible invasive here, in particular by pastoralists in the drier areas of the country. But I bet people are working on novel, profitable uses. Maybe someone in northern Kenya is already marketing mesquite honey, or carvings made of mesquite wood?
Rapid agrobiodiversity surveys
This SciDevNet piece led me to this Nature article on the theory and practice of the Rapid Biological Inventory, “a quick, intensive taxonomic expedition designed to identify areas of particular biological, geological and cultural significance before development and exploitation take hold.”
Using satellite images, maps and other data, biologists target promising areas and then work with local scientists and students to walk existing and newly cut trails, recording the species they encounter. (…) In parallel with these are social inventories — surveys of the organisational structure of local communities and how they use the forest. The teams work with indigenous groups, government and local conservation organisations to deepen their understanding of the value of the surveyed areas.
I think the concept was pioneered by Conservation International, under the name Rapid Assessment Program, or RAP, but as far as I can see it hasn’t been applied to agricultural biodiversity, at least not explicitly. Seems to me one could come up with a pretty good “rapid agrodiversity assessment” methodology based on standard crop descriptors combined with traditional knowledge, wrapped up in a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) approach. Maybe someone already has?
Keep posted
I’ve added a little gizmo that makes it easier to keep up with comments happening here (the hidden agenda being to encourage people to share comments). When you go to leave a comment, you’ll see a link that lets you subscribe — and email will notify you of new comments. You don’t actually have to leave a comment to use it, so you can subscribe to a post that has a lively discussion without having to join the discussion.
How the European Common Catalogue destroys biodiversity
Charities know that it is a good idea to forge a bond between those who have and those who have not — the better to make those who have, give. So winsome children and kindly old people show us that we are all part of one big happy family, and families help one another, don’t they? But what if those who are normally the position of having, and giving, become those who need?
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that as far as agricultural biodiversity is concerned, Europe is probably more in need of help than anywhere else. Elsewhere, as in Europe, intensive agriculture and monocropping are destroying existing biodiversity. But elsewhere, unlike Europe, farmers, gardeners and ordinary folk who just want to grow themselves a bit of food have a bit of choice. If they can find the variety they want, they can buy it (or obtain it by barter, whatever) and grow it. In Europe that is not legal.
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