Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
There’s a big forestry meeting going on in Nairobi, with that title. You can see photos. IISD are on it, of course. And ICRAF and others are twittering up a storm.
No matter how much you market it, people have to see value for your product in order to use it. – Onsango KEFRI #ForestPolicy
— CIFOR-ICRAF (@CIFOR_ICRAF) June 28, 2012
How is agriculture being presented? As the enemy, as usual? Or is the “landscape approach” rhetoric gaining purchase? Anyone want to share their impressions with us?
Paul Madden, the UK’s High Commissioner in Canberra, Australia, is just back from Tasmania full of enthusiasm for …
UK pharma giant GSK. 1 They process poppies grown by some 400 farms around the island, which go on to become the basis for many important global medicines. It is a very R&D oriented business, as new plant varieties are constantly being developed to produce increasingly sophisticated alkaloids.
If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ll know what comes next, and I hate to disappoint.
Why on earth is Tasmania encouraged to produce “half the world’s legitimate opiates,” while the same liberty and investment are not afforded the poor farmers of Afghanistan? Britain has interests there too, I believe. Less than a year ago the cumulative cost of those interests was estimated at GBP18 billion. How much would have been needed to create a properly constituted market that would adequately reward Afghan farmers for their resilience, agricultural know-how, and contributions to on-farm conservation? How much might such an effort have saved in not having to combat the people who are supporting Afghan farmers?
It isn’t just the drugs. Madden notes that
Nothing is wasted: the poppy seeds which are a by-product are sold into the catering industry. When you tuck into a lemon and poppy seed muffin anywhere in the world, the chances are the seeds came from GSK in Tasmania.
Funnily enough, that doesn’t impress me either. Were there no sour notes in the High Commissioner’s trip?
My only disappointment was to learn that these poppies are all white, rather than the red ones we associate with Poppy Day in the UK.
How very parochial, and biologically unbriefed.
The red poppies — Papaver rhoeas as opposed to P. somniferum — don’t produce opium or morphine, although they make plenty of thebaine. And believe it or not, thebaine is often the basis for those “increasingly sophisticated alkaloids,” and Tasmanian researchers are working hard to block synthesis at that point, so the poppies would be “useless for the illicit drug trade“.
One final point; they don’t have to be all white, unless you want them to be.
Ok, so let’s recap, there’s the Global Forest Disturbance Alert System (GloF-DAS), then there’s InfoAmazonia.org (also, like GloF-DAS, written up by Mongabay.com), and finally (?) there’s Terra-i, which has just got a write up by the NY Times, no less. All online mapping platforms. All nicely interactive. All about forests. All doing somewhat different, but related, things. You just have to wonder if there might not be some mileage in bringing them together in some way.
Andy Farrow has some issues with crop mapping too:
I found Monfreda and SPAM were ‘better’ in different places when I was reviewing the legumes but still there are large areas of confusion between, for example, common beans and cowpeas.
Oh, and he too would like to know how exactly the people behind the Global Yield Gap Atlas decided to use HarvestChoice’s Spatial Production Allocation Model to do their mapping.
Our friends of the HarvestChoice team at IFPRI have been busy. Hot on the heels of MAPPR, comes news that their Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM) will be used to produce a Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA), which will “reveal the ‘gap’ between the current average yields of farms and their maximum production potential.” Sounds very useful. We have blogged about SPAM before. I was particularly intrigued by this statement in the IFPRI post on the subject, though:
At a recent GYGA meeting in Naivasha, Kenya, Atlas collaborators—which include Jawoo Koo of IFPRI—comparatively reviewed two major crop distribution maps and announced that they would use the ones produced by an IFPRI model—the Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM)—as a basis for the Atlas.
It would be interesting to know what the other lot of crop distribution maps were, the ones that were found wanting. One of our earlier posts does try to get to grips with the taxonomy of crop mapping, not particularly comprehensively, it has to be said. So was it perhaps CIAT’s Crop Atlas of the World? 2 Or was it the dataset of Monfreda et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000”? Or something else that we missed at the time? Maybe HarvestChoice/IFPRI are too modest to say, but it would still be good to know the basis for GYGA’s decision.