Really great to see the strides that traditional African leafy greens have been making in the past few years in Kenya. I remember twenty years ago, when I first went there and started working on these plants, decent seeds could only be had from a few specialized farmers in Western Province. Now both seeds and the veggies themselves seem to be all over. And people are willing to pay a hefty premium for them. Truly a success story.
European agroecology meeting in full flow
https://twitter.com/ileia_NL/status/349927844526309376
That would be at the conference on Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda that we Nibbled yesterday. You can also follow proceedings at #EUagroeco2013. Sounds like fun. Anyone there want to summarize it for us?
Ancient American agrobiodiversity podcasts galore, and more
No sooner had I digested (as it were) Jeremy’s latest offering, that I ran across two other recent podcasts also on subjects related to ancient American agriculture. Archaeologist Dr David Lentz discusses the Pompeii of Central America in the latest Academic Minute. And environmental journalist Sam Eaton talks about the resurgence of amaranth in Mexico. Never rains but it pours.
Well, since it’s raining so hard, let me throw in a couple of related tidbits. If you’ve got a paper on amaranth or any other similarly downtrodden crop, you have until 15 July to put in an abstract for the 3rd International Conference on Neglected and Underutilized Species, to be held in Accra, Ghana on 25-27 September 2013. And if you’re Brazilian, and you’re interested in studying agrobiodiversity in Latin America, including NUS no doubt, you have until June 30 to apply for a studentship. And finally there is the IX Simposio Internacional de Recursos Genéticos para América Latina y el Caribe in El Salvador in November.
LATER: Talk about zeitgeist. Here’s another little something for the weekend for all you NUS aficionados: there’s a special issue of Sustainability in the works on “Underutilized Plant Species: Leveraging Food and Nutritional Security, and Income Generation.” Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2013.
Impact of climate change on business apparently does not include loss of crop diversity
I suppose I should have expected it. A new UNEP report is out, entitled GEO-5 for Business: Impacts of a Changing Environment on the Corporate Sector. GEO-5 being, of course, the fifth Global Environment Outlook, “a consultative, participatory process that builds capacity for conducting integrated environmental assessments for reporting on the state, trends and outlooks of the environment.”
These are the risks the consultative, participatory report highlights for the food and beverage industry:
- Changes in availability, quality, price, and sources of agricultural products due to climate change and other environmental changes
- Increased cost of fossil fuel-based energy
- Reduced crop yields due to water scarcity
- Conflicts among different users of limited water resources
- Increased competition for arable land
- Depletion of seafood stocks
- Increased consumer and regulatory pressure to reduce environmental impacts of meat production and of chemicals and fertilizers
And these are the opportunities:
- New markets for alternative supplies or more climate-resilient food varieties
- Opportunities for businesses in new agricultural growing zones
- Expanded markets for organic foods and sustainable food production
- Reputational benefits from sustainable food product certifications
Nothing, however, about the risk of loss of crop diversity, and how this would impact the ability to supply those burgeoning, beckoning markets with the needed “climate-resilient food varieties.”
Which, as I say, should probably not have surprised me. But still.
Brainfood: Pear history, Markets & biodiversity, Conserving small populations, Niche & range, Sustainability in the US, Production forecasts, Sheep differences
- The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art. An oldie, but worth reading just for the analogy between the pear connoisseur and the opera aficionado.
- Effects of market integration on agricultural biodiversity in a tropical frontier. Darien, Panama. Roads are bad for crop diversity, of the interspecific kind at least.
- Conservation genetics and the persistence and translocation of small populations: bighorn sheep populations as examples. Bigger is definitely better.
- Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Specialist species tend to have small range sizes, making them doubly vulnerable. Trebly so if they have small populations too, I guess (see above).
- Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest. …depends on on-farm diversity, and here’s three things you can do to promote it, because it ain’t getting any better: collect statistics, redirect subsidies, and think beyond peak yield. Ah but wait, you may have to change the IP system. As you were.
- Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. For rice, wheat, maize and soybean, current rates of yield increase, if they continue, which I suppose is a big if, what with climate change and all, would mean about 50% production increases by 2050, rather than the supposedly needed 100%.
- Genome-Wide Genetic Diversity and Differentially Selected Regions among Suffolk, Rambouillet, Columbia, Polypay, and Targhee Sheep. Suffolk is different from the others, which we already knew were related. Ah, but now we know where exactly in the genome the differences are.