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Berry Go Round No. 41

NewImage Having recently taken on a bit of the management responsibility for Berry Go Round, I am duty bound to give it perhaps more room than we might have in the past. 1 Mr Subjunctive at Plants are the Strangest People has done a bang up job of serving some botanical delights from the blogosphere. Head on over there for links to quasi-carnivorous plants, orchids galore, and much else besides. And here’s the stuff that’s more relevant to us. 2

Bizarrely, someone submitted the Wild Taro Research Project, which of course ought to be of great interest to lots of people here. But here’s the weird part: it’s password protected. So, now what? You’ve drawn attention to yourself and what you have to offer, but you won’t let us go any further? There’s a name for that kind of behaviour, and it isn’t very nice.

Hort Log has something called a flat and maroon ginger, but doesn’t know what actually to call it. Does Kaempferia qualify as a wild relative of Zingiber? No idea.

Christie Wilcox over at Observations of a Nerd lays into the Nature paper that asked whether alien species deserve their bad reputation. Her dissection of the argument may not make much sense if you can’t get at the original paper, but if you can, I hope you’ll enjoy her skewering as much as I did. It’s a gem. And, of course, some invasives are agricultural, and some invasives threaten agricultural species, so we’re happy both ways.

This one’s kinda meta, inasmuch as Farmscape’s post is in fact about another post; German artist Uli Westphal has been chanelling the ghost of Esther Rantzen 3 to collect images of outlandishly-shaped vegetables. Westphal calls the project Mutatoes. I didn’t check to see whether any oca had snuck in there. Another project documents tomato diversity. And hey, Uli, if you’re reading this, get in touch; we may be able to help you get to grips with taxonomy.

Mr Subjunctive also serves up Annals of Botany’s blog post on date sex, and really, some of the non-ag links are absolutely fascinating too. There’s a lot there.

The next Berry Go Round will be hosted at Beyond the Brambles, 4 and you can submit anything you come across, not just stuff you produced yourself.

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An apple a decade

So word has it that the Convention on Biological Diversity people will be handing out apples (or models of apples) with the logo of the Decade of Biodiversity on them during the 66th session of the UN General Assembly in New York City this September. Including to President Obama. The only photograph I’ve been able to find of these fruits comes from Nagoya last year, but they don’t look like heirloom varieties to me. An opportunity missed?

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Featured: Crops for the Future

Michael thinks Luigi has an overwrought imagination brought on by spending too much time watching cheesy movies:

CFFRC will add much research and training capacity to address and overcome production and use constraints of “underutilised crops”. Wouldn’t we all wish other governments would be as generous as Malaysia’s and, rather than just paying lip service, effectively support the diversification of agriculture through greater crop diversity? CFFRC and CFF are separate legal entities, but will closely coordinate their work. CFF has indeed a seat on CFFRC’s Board. CFF will continue to focus on its role as an information platform and international facilitator, but will be locally strengthened through the brain power and opportunities of a research center that is the largest of its kind (dedicated exclusively to “crops for the future”). Note that CFFRC will work under CFF’s direction and within its mandate, but it is a company under Malaysian law. CFFRC was officially launched this week by the Prime Minister of Malaysia, and if you are patient for another day or so and give us some breathing space after an exhausting Symposium we will properly report on the CFF website on recent developments.

Amen to that, congratulations to all concerned, and very best wishes for the future!

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Africa’s Green Revolution: A report from the barricades

Jacob van Etten has sent in this post, with the following disclaimer: I contributed one of the articles to the issue and participated in a preparatory workshop. My own addition to this issue highlights the role of ICT technologies to create new networks of collaboration around technological innovation, creating new links between scientists and farmers. Luigi will give his own critical assessment of that piece in a separate post.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the Milennium Villages Program and the new Feed the Future program are all busy to make a new Green Revolution happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. These initiatives promote similar combinations of better access to inputs such as fertilizers and improved varieties, including the development of input markets so that the inputs keep getting to the farms in the future, too.

The latest issue of the IDS Bulletin reports from the ground on these African Green Revolution initiatives. The issue contains interesting field studies from Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ghana. The focus is not that of traditional impact evaluation, though. The studies look at how the different projects take shape through an institutional, political lens. How are local alliances shaped to realize the objectives of these programs? And whose interests are being served anyway?

The stories that emerge are tremendously diverse and well worth reading. For instance, Kenya, with its strong but unevenly developed private seed sector, versus Ethiopia‘s still largely state-controlled system give very different contexts to work in. Especially fascinating is the study on Malawi. Malawi has been a poster child for its input subsidy programme. Blessings Chinsinga investigates how this plays out on the ground.

One of the lessons is that seed market development, as promoted by the different African Green Revolution initiatives, is supply-driven rather than demand-driven. For agrobiodiversity, this means that the supply often becomes reduced to a few modern varieties, even though there might be demand for a more diverse set of seeds.

There is very little evidence that the different projects were designed explicitly taking the political-economic diversity on the ground into account. As a consequence, the different interventions seem to do little to change local power balances or place agricultural innovation on a more democratic footing. Therefore, Ian Scoones and John Thompson, in the introductory article, call for more democratic deliberation on these issues, so that more diverse perspectives come to the table.

To me it seems that we need fairly radical new ways to make the voices of farmers heard and to prevent certain elites from undermining the process. Even supposedly democratic deliberations are often hijacked by elite opinions as a result of cultural conventions, verbal assertiveness and so on. Perhaps we should promote less a “talking” democracy and more a “doing” democracy. 5 Democratic processes that tap into the expert knowledge of farmers may be less easy to hijack by non-experts, such as business elites. Vote with your seed.