Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
From Jacob van Etten. Some demographic projections tell us that global population numbers will grow to 9 billion in 2100 and stabilize around this number. So how can people three generations down the line feed themselves, while still conserving biodiversity? Lian Pin Koh offers a solution based on simple economic principles. Grow the most productive …
Something just in from our occasional contributor Jacob van Etten. Climate change will shift the limits of the suitable areas of many wild animals and plants, including crop wild relatives. Some species may adapt by gradually moving into areas which resemble their current home area. In other cases, no bridges exist to connect old and …
Continue reading “Getting to grips with ecological interactions”
Jacob van Etten continues our coffee-table conversation about whether crops determine everything. All of this started off with Wittfogel’s Oriental despotism and how crops (rice) and cropping technologies (irrigation) give shape to whole societies. Jeremy mentioned Malcolm Gladwell, who argues in Outliers that Asians are good in math because they grow rice. Crops determine everything? …
Another in our series of occasional contributions from Jacob van Etten. Last week I was at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) to talk about seed systems. To some degree or another, the people around the table were maize experts. We discussed climate change and this led to some reflections on the question: If maize …
Continue reading “Back to sorghum: an African response to climate change?”
The first installment of a promised two-part coffee-table conversation from Jacob van Etten. Some time ago, I promised to write something about if and how crops shape societies. ‘Environmental determinism’ and ‘technological determinism’ are not popular theories in the social sciences these days. ‘Crop determinism’ is in a way both these types of determinism in …