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Report on farming in Tanzania

Vel Gnanendran heads the Tanzania office of DFID, the UK’s Department for International Development. He recently decided to find out as much as he could about agriculture in Tanzania, and his report is an interesting read. Here’s part of his conclusion:

Farmers operate in a world of tremendous uncertainty. What will the world price of the crop be when it comes to harvest time? Will government policy be the same next season? Will the rains come this year? What is the cost benefit of investing in seeds and fertilisers? And, related but hardest of all, will someone buy the crop at a decent price? I have a degree in economics, but this is akin to applied quantum game theory.

Global markets and prices are important, for sure, but it would be good to see a little more emphasis on supply food to local markets, rather than seeing agriculture purely as oriented to global markets.

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Preserving the canon of taste

Fascinating article in Aeon magazine by Jill Neimark, exploring the role of specific, older varieties in the experience of taste. I won’t steal her thunder here, just urge you to read it. I will, however, cavil at one statement:

All commercial apples, including Granny Smiths, have been hybridised to a sugary monotone.

That’s simply not true, unless hybridised means something else in Georgia.

If they’re called Granny Smith, their genetics should be the same. If they taste dreadful from the supermarket, and astonishing picked up from a roadside stand “by a white-frame house on a curving, shady lane by Lake Allatoona,” that’s the result of nurture, not nature.

But please ignore my quibbles — and I have others — unless you agree that sometimes accuracy matters.

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Patently broken?

Patents are good for innovation, right? Well…

In 1970 the United States recognised the potential of crop science by broadening the scope of patents in agriculture. Patents are supposed to reward inventiveness, so that should have galvanised progress. Yet, despite providing extra protection, that change and a further broadening of the regime in the 1980s led neither to more private research into wheat nor to an increase in yields. Overall, the productivity of American agriculture continued its gentle upward climb, much as it had before.

From an interesting piece in The Economist on why patents may not be all they’re cracked up to be after all, not least for agriculture.

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Maize too

Hot on the heels of the wheat data, here’s the contribution made by CIMMYT to new maize varieties released by India:

maize

Eight of the nine hybrids owe something to CIMMYT germplasm, as shown by the yellow highlighting. The last one is an industry hybrid, and information on its parentage is unfortunately proprietary. Thanks to all at CIMMYT for sharing both the wheat and maize analyses.