Brazil’s National Statistics Office (IBGE) recently released a new set of maps of the Amazon showing how it is being converted to agricultural land. There’s a nice discussion over at Mongbay.com. And check out the post a few days back on the BBC radio programme on nuts in Brazil: I’ve just added a link to a short article.
Trade information by mobile
Between the Common Catalogue on one side and regulations on the entry of new agricultural products on the other, it does sometimes seem like the EU just doesn’t want farmers to grow diverse crops, either within its borders or indeed anywhere else on Earth. Anyway, on the latter issue, maybe one of the answers is for developing world farmers to trade more among themselves. One of the bottlenecks to that, of course, is the availability of price and other information. So it was really interesting to read in The Economist about tradenet, an internet application developed by a software company out of Ghana that enables users to exchange market information, including by SMS text messages. Mobile telephony is of course expanding at tremendous speed in Africa. Tradenet is basically a sort of eBay for agricultural products, where you can put in your bid by cell phone. And more. Listen to this: “we will incorporate the ability to generate digital maps of your country with overlays of pricing for commodities, as well as include key markets in neighboring countries, where you can zoom or pan around vector maps.” Cool or what?
Europe stomps on biodiversity source
People outside the European Union (and many within it) are often surprised by the draconian regime surrounding seeds. Essentially, only registered varieties can be sold, and it costs the same to register some piffling little variety of interest only to a handful of gardeners as to register a new megavariety that will cloak the majority of farmers’ fields. The Common Catalogue, as it is known, has probably extinguished more local varieties than anything else. Some stalwarts have fought the legislation by simply ignoring it. (Full disclosure: I was once one of them.) But now a French Court has dumped a fine of €17,130 on the Kokopelli Association (also in English), for placing unregistered varieties on the market. That could easily put an end to the Association, and perhaps the more than 2000 varieties that it maintains and makes available to gardeners. Is that really what the EU, with all its lip service to biodiversity, wants? I think it is.
Kokopelli’s press release is here.
Pharaonic medicine
Not much detail in this press release from the University of Manchester, but the idea to document what plants were used – and how – by the ancient Egyptians for medicinal purposes sounds great.
Assisted migration
Would you move a species threatened by climate change to an area where it isn’t currently found but where the new climate suits it better? That’s “assisted migration,” and the lively debate around it is described by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times here. He quotes a thorough review of the ecological and evolutionary responses to climate change which may be found online as a pdf here. It seems to me that assisted migration is likely to be feasible for only a small number of wild species, but what about crops? Making threatened crops and landraces available to farmers in more suitable climates sounds like a pretty good idea to me.