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A great quiz, not so well done

Questionable Mosquito I was thrilled to see a Tweet from Farming First asking How much do you know about agriculture, nutrition and health? Lots, and I love online quizzes and the opportunity to show off. Who doesn’t? So I hurried on over, to discover a quiz from IFPRI, tied to the meeting on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition & Health, which opens tomorrow in New Delhi. 1 It is really nice, with a good mix of questions and types of answers. I only really carped at one, pictured over there. Perhaps you can guess why. Anyway, I had a good time answering all the questions, definitely stumped for a few. Discovered I had to give them all sorts of demographic information; well, there’s no free lunch. So now can I have my results and the obligatory share this with all your friends or we’ll hate you forever link? No such luck. Instead I got sent to the answers, 2 and instructions to give myself one point for every right answer and zero for wrong answers. But not my own answers, right or wrong. I couldn’t precisely remember them either, and we all know how easy it is to misremember in one’s favour. I think I got five wrong, four if we can have an argument about the way the question was worded. I did get the mosquito question right, because I knew what they meant, even if they didn’t.

Bottom line: It’s a good quiz, worth spending a few minutes on.

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Featured: Egyptian genebank

More news has come in from the Desert Research Center in Egypt, which is spread over several sites. We knew the genebank in North Sinai had been looted, while the national genebank, near Giza, seemed to be safe. Now we learn that a site at Matrya, on the outskirts of Cairo, has been robbed, with 300-400 computers and other equipment loaded into private cars between 1 and 5 in the morning. At least, that’s what I get from the message, which seems to have been through a combination of machine and human translation. Having but two words of Arabic, I can’t complain. However, if anyone out there more fluent than me would like to get in contact and prepare a more readable account, we’ll be happy to host it. Anonymously if need be.

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How much do world food prices influence African market prices?

Everybody’s talking about the current food price crisis; what it means, what’s causing it; whether it is an opportunity to ask for increased funding. With impeccable timing, IFPRI has released a report examining the extent to which market prices in sub-Saharan Africa reflect changes in global prices. I haven’t read it, and here are IFPRI’s take-home messages:

  • Staple food prices in these countries rose 63 percent between mid-2007 and mid-2008, about three-quarters of the proportional increase in world prices.
  • Statistical analysis over 5 to 10 years indicates a long-term relationship with world prices in only 13 of the 62 African food prices examined. African rice prices are more closely linked to world markets than are maize prices.
  • The global food crisis was unusual in influencing African food prices, probably because of the size of the increase and the fact that it coincided with oil price increases. Policy responses and local factors exacerbated the effect in some cases.

IFPRI does then go on to offer some suggestions.

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Mixing it up for organic tomatoes

ResearchBlogging.org The many benefits of growing a mixture of crop varieties together have now been demonstrated for many crops under many conditions. Latest entry is in a kind of specialised niche — organic tomatoes for processing — and the results are a little underwhelming. Three scientists at the University of California, Davis, grew one, three or five tomato varieties in soil that was either fallow or had a mustard cover crop the preceding winter. 3 Although there were differences between the mixtures and the monocrop, they were not very pronounced: more shoots, and more fruits that were somewhat redder.

The 3-cv mixture thus had some minor advantages compared with the monoculture, but overall, there was little evidence of higher ecosystem functions from mixtures vs. monoculture.

Leaving aside the question of whether the growing conditions on the farm, as described in the paper, accord with organic ideals, given that they do abide by the rules, it is hard to know what to make of the poor showing of mixtures. The authors concede that there may simply be no benefit to be had because the conditions on California organic processing tomato farms don’t stress the crop to the point where a mixture might be a good thing. It is also possible that the varieties — AB-2, CXD-19, H-2601, H-8892 and Red Spring — do not actually encompass enough trait diversity to offer any benefits. But then, they were chosen as simply the best-performing processing varieties. If mixtures were assembled deliberately to deliver potential benefits, the results might well be different.

Still, good to know.