Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

March 27, 2013March 27, 2013

Yes, we have no banana statistics

My … hope is that people will eventually stop saying ‘bananas and plantains’. For one thing, it only makes sense is if the meaning of ‘banana’ is restricted to dessert bananas and the meaning of ‘plantain’ extended to all cooking bananas.

This, as you might imagine, is music to my ears. We’ve searched in vain, and often, and fruitlessly ¹ for some kind of shibboleth to distinguish banana from plantain. There isn’t one. So to have the ProMusa blog standing up to be counted, again, is definitely something to welcome. And that’s not all.

In addition to taking aim at terminological inexactitude, our colleague-in-arms Anne Vezina, the blogger in question, also has a go at numerical fudge, with an attack on the “mythical fourth place ranking” of bananas on some ill-defined metric of global importance. Digging deep into FAOSTAT, she concludes:

Depending on the indicator and the year, bananas usually end up somewhere between the 8th and 10th position after discarding animal products and non-food crop commodities (adding plantains doesn’t change the ranking). But if instead of including all the banana-producing countries, only the least developed ones are considered, adding the values for plantains and bananas moves the duo up to fourth place, behind rice, cassava (instead of wheat) and maize.

The facts have spoken. Will anybody listen?

March 26, 2013

Market failure

Edward Carr’s continuing series on Doing Food Security Differently comes to a real fork in the road. Over and over again, one hears economists say that we have to connect poor farmers to markets, that’s the only way they’ll ever make it out of poverty. Carr points out that

[S]implifying one’s farm to focus on only a few key crops for which there is “comparative advantage”, and then using the proceeds to buy food, clothing, shelter and other necessities, works great when the market for those crops is strong. But what happens when the food you need to buy becomes more dear than the crops you are growing, for example through food price spikes or a shift in markets that leave one’s farm worth only a fraction of what is needed to feed and clothe one’s family?

To which I would add that even without price spikes or a shift in markets, the cash you earn might not be enough to buy back the nutrition you lose by focusing on a few key crops.

Carr’s main point is that the governments under which poor farmers labour are generally unlikely to be able to step in with safety nets when farmers need them. Not that safety nets are the answer, but in changing traditional cropping patterns, you also change traditional safety nets.

If, in coastal Ghana, you are growing maize and cassava as your principal crops, you can sell both in years where the market is good, and you can eat both in years where the market turns on you. I have referred to opting out of markets as temporary deglobalization, where people opt in and out of markets as they gauge their risks and opportunities.

Forcing farmers away from this model … removes the option of turning away from markets and eating the crops in conditions of years where the markets are not favorable. This is even more true when some of that newly reduced crop mix only takes value from sale on global markets (i.e. cocoa) and/or which cannot be eaten (i.e. cotton).

March 25, 2013March 21, 2013

Brainfood: Coconut and climate, Cereal biofortification, Ancient tuber oat grass, Grape diversity, Shade cacao, Ancient Central Asian ag, Diversity of knowledge, Edible canna

Climate change and coconut plantations in India: Impacts and potential adaptation gains. Seems we don’t need to worry about coconut in India. Much. Overall.
Biofortification of cereals to overcome hidden hunger. Need to understand mineral uptake and transport mechanisms better. But once we do…
Evaluating prehistoric finds of Arrhenatherum elatius var. bulbosum in north-western and central Europe with an emphasis on the first Neolithic finds in Northern Germany. May just have had a ritual role.
Genetic diversity and population structure assessed by SSR and SNP markers in a large germplasm collection of grape. High diversity despite duplication. Ecogeographic groupings within the cultivated material. Genetic core more genetically diverse than phenological core, though similarly phenotypically diverse. Information will revolutionize breeding. No, not really.
Shade Tree Diversity, Cocoa Pest Damage, Yield Compensating Inputs and Farmers’ Net Returns in West Africa. Best thing is to have a diverse shade canopy, but under 50%.
Agricultural production in the Central Asian mountains: Tuzusai, Kazakhstan (410‐150 b.c.). Yes, agriculture. Not just pastoralism.
Diversity of Plant Knowledge as an Adaptive Asset: A Case Study with Standing Rock Elders. Differences among individuals may be just that, rather than “lack of cultural consensus” and may be adaptive as circumstances change.
The Origin of Southeastern Asian Triploid Edible Canna (Canna discolor Lindl.) Revealed by Molecular Cytogenetical Study. C. indica var. indica and C. plurituberosa are the proud and newly-identified parents.

March 22, 2013

World Water Day

World this day, world that day, world the other day.

Yesterday, forests, today water. Thanks, CIAT, for giving us a lazy way out.

March 20, 2013

Food security is hard

Despite decades of literature and body of experience to the contrary, it seems that the policy world, and indeed much development implementation, continues to view issues of hunger as the relatively straightforward outcome of production shortfalls that can be addressed through equally straightforward technical fixes ranging from changed farming techniques to new agricultural technologies such as GMOs. This view is frustrating, given its persistence in the face of roughly five decades of project failures and ephemeral results that evaporated at the end of “successful” projects. More nuanced work has started to think about issues of production in concert with the distribution function of markets. However, the bulk of policy and implementation along these lines couples the simplistic “technical fix” mentality of earlier work on food security with a sort of naïve market triumphalism that tends to focus on the possible benefits of market engagement with little mention or reasonable understanding of likely problematic outcomes.

Edward Carr continues to explore how better to achieve food security. Did you think it was going to be easy?