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Keeping an eye on the big playas

To find out what mainstream agriculture is up to, you have to follow mainstream media outlets, and some of those are behind a paywall much of the time. 1 So I’m glad that both Kay McDonald at Big Picture Agriculture and Thomas Barnett at Globlogization subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. From Big Picture Agriculture we learn that yesterday, World Food Day, the WSJ devoted a lot of space to Innovations in Agriculture. There’s a lot there to pore over. And both Kay and Tom go large on the WSJ’s report on no-till farming, largely as a response to high energy costs.

Also for World Food Day, Kay shares this little insight into professional doomsayers:

Lester Brown must be astonished that there are 130 million fewer hungry people now than there were 20 years ago even though we have over 1.5 billion more people to feed. But, undaunted, this week he continues to warn that we will soon be running out of food. One of these years he’ll be right, but I doubt that it’ll be this next year. His logic makes sense and grabs headlines around the world’s leading news publications except he lacks one element in his analysis and that is the economics of supply and demand for food production. Food commodity prices are high right now and the whole world is responding, anxious to cash in on some profits.

To which I, an unprofessional doomsayer, would like to add only that there are limits to productivity, even if mainstream economists don’t always recognise them.

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If I had a $ for every key to feeding the world…

…I’d have about enough for a pizza in Rome.

Having presented a hostage to fortune with this recent tweet, I thought I’d better check how many things have actually been put forward as keys to feeding the world. Unsurprisingly on this particular World Food Day, the most common answer is indeed agricultural cooperatives, but ranging into the nether regions of a Google search throws up the following eclectic, but alas short, list:

Crop quality
Integrated Pest Management
Biotechnology
Diets and nutrition
Russia’s small-scale organic agriculture model (sic)
Modern agriculture
Peasants

Trying variants such as “key to agricultural development”, “agricultural production” and “agricultural sustainability” broadens the range to include some old favourites, such as perennial crops, little-known crops, ICTs, research/extension and policy; even biodiversity finally makes an appearance. But perhaps the most interesting result is that only a very few items appear on more than one of these lists: farmers’ organizations, biotechnology and girls/women.

Anyway, it’s World Food Day, and you can get involved!

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Saving rice from a truant monsoon

Forsaken by the rain gods, the tribal farmers in the district are now mounting a desperate attempt to salvage their wilting crop. What is at stake is not only their livelihood, but also the preservation of over a dozen rare and invaluable indigenous varieties of rice. If the attempt by these farmers doesn’t succeed, the state could lose many rice varieties for ever…

“These tribal farmers have been the sole saviours of the seeds of many indigenous and rare varieties of rice. They have been cultivating and saving them religiously despite suffering losses as these varieties have only half the yield when compared to hybrid ones…”

Well, maybe. But Jeerakashala, Navara, Adukkan, Thondi and Chomala are in fact in IRRI’s genebank, according to Genesys.

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Brainfood: Resistances, Seed networks, Medicinal plant protection, Pollinator knowledge gaps

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Abusing my position on Kasalath rice

OK, so we don’t have the clout or industry standing of The Financial Express, of Tropicana Tower (4th floor), 45, Topkhana Road, GPO Box 2526 Dhaka–1000, Bangladesh. But we have our pride.

So when we saw this paragraph in a major outburst of nationalistic pride concerning Kasalath rice …

Well, we were just a tad peeved.

I went online and fired off a very polite Letter to the Editor.

In your article BD gets IRRI recognition as origin country of rice variety Kasalath you describe the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog as “an IRRI blog”. As part-owner of that blog, I can assure you this is wrong. Please issue a correction and edit to state “Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an independent blog”.

I look forward to your swift response.

Except that online security at The Financial Express leaves a little to be desired. Having told me to type the characters I saw into the box, it failed actually to display any characters. Nothing daunted, I found an actual email for the actual editor, and sent him the same message, with a PS alerting him to the problem with his security.

Back, snappy as anything, came an email, requiring me to reply in order to pass their stringent security checks. I did so. Back came another email, which I reproduce in its entirety.

Since then, not a word. Not one. After two whole weeks, the erroneous statement stands, an affront to our puffed-up sense of self-importance.

What to conclude? It isn’t as if we object to being associated with IRRI, just that, well, we aren’t.

Just as Kasalath isn’t actually a Bangladeshi rice. It’s just a rice that grows on land in that country, and some other countries.