Prashant Mishra gives an Indian NGO’s perspective on sorghum and why many Indian farmers refer to it as Jowar Mata — Mother Sorghum. Even after the advances of the Green Revolution, sorghum thrives and sustains the very poorest people in marginal lands.
What did Neanderthals eat?
Recent media reports that Neanderthals were occasional cannibals and that women may have accompanied the men on their hunts got me thinking about the Neanderthal diet in general. In particular, did they eat much in the way of plant products at all? While meat was clearly the mainstay of the diet, it does seem from this interesting rebuttal of the hunting women hypothesis that: Â
Vegetable foods may well have been part of Middle Paleolithic diets in Eurasia, but these were more like salads, snacks, and desserts than energy-rich staples…Large underground storage organs are common among plant taxa in arid sub-Saharan Africa, but the high-yield edible plant foods of temperate and Mediterranean Eurasia tend to be seeds and nuts that, while potentially nutritious, require more effort to collect and process and thus afford low net yields (Kuhn and Stiner 2006:957).
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to promote some underutilized nut as a Neanderthal dessert? Or perhaps that would not be such a clever idea, given that the Neanderthals died out… Anyway, although some of the information sources listed seem somewhat suspect, there is a compendium of internet resources on the “paleolithic diet” here.
Protecting TK
There seems to have been a breakthrough – procedurally at any rate – at the WIPO discussions in Geneva on protecting traditional knowledge, folklore and expressions of culture (genetic resources are also on the table). Meanwhile, in Abuja, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo has launched a committee to boost research on traditional medicine.
A Philippines point of view
A long piece on Philippine agricultural biodiversity and agroforestry in a blog called MagSakaUnlad, written by Virgilio Villancio, who is with the Agricultural Systems Cluster of the College of Agriculture, University of the Philippines at Los Banos.
Is agriculture an ecosystem?
Given the amount of land occupied by farmers and farming, you might be forgiven for thinking that ecologists would at least pay it more than lip service. But no. A press release from Brown University in the US announces the establishment of the first secretariat for the International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network. It explains the vital importance of long term studies in ecology, to determine trends that may well be invisible over shorter periods. And it explains the various ways in which ecosystems change over time. But does it mention agriculture or changes in agricultural biodiversity? Of course not.