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Carnival of Idiots

A Berry Go Round

We’re hosting the next edition of Berry go Round, a blog carnival dedicated to plants and botany. In case you didn’t know, a blog carnival gathers together in one place, on a regular basis, good blog posts on a particular topic. It’s a way of pointing people to stuff they may not know about and of sharing the love. And we’ve had loads of submissions for the next Berry go Round.

Alas, most of them are idiotic submissions from idiots who are paid by even bigger idiots to waste our time and spoil the internet for everyone.

We have so far received 16 tip-top recommendations, from 15 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True to 10 Things That Won’t Burn in a House Fire. You can imagine how thrilled we will be to share those with you next week.

The weird part about this spam torrent is that it probably involves real people. There’s a submission form to nominate posts for the carnival and it requires some pretty elaborate cutting and pasting that I suspect needs not a robot but a person. Even if it didn’t, there’s a person looking at each submission with a delete button at his fingertips. 1 And the people who are polluting our world with this crap are, I bet, being paid by their evil overlords to do so.

Wise up, cretins. Your crap ain’t gonna make it to our pages. Ever.

If, on the other hand, you genuinely want to share an interesting post on plants or botany — your own or someone else’s — use the form, or send direct to berrygoround at gmail dot com, and after intense scrutiny by our living, breathing crap detector, there’s a good chance it will make it to our pages.

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Overstating the case against the Pacific development paradigm

I must confess to having some sympathy with Helen Hughes’ scathing critique of development in the South Pacific, but she goes too far, surely. For example, with reference to one of the Millennium Goals, she says that

“The ending of hunger” amounts to a stock diet of sago and stringy sweet potato. Population pressure, plus the erosion of hunting, has led to a decline in nutrition.

However, even in such undeniably poor and troubled places as the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal people eat several root and tuber crops, bananas and a range of indigenous vegetables. There certainly are nutritional problems in the Pacific. Rising rates of diabetes and heart disease are testament to that. But the modernization and homogenization of diets are to blame, not “sago and stringy sweet potato.” If anything, it will be work on those very same sweet potatoes so disparaged by Hughes that will end hunger in many parts of the Pacific.

And to suggest that oil palm cultivation is some sort of panacea is disingenuous at best. Finally, I’m no expert on the cultures of Papua New Guinea, but this parting shot

…why is it that after a decade of implementation of the Millennium Goals, backed by billions of taxpayers’ dollars, women in PNG villages choose to breastfeed piglets because pigs are more valuable than children?

sounds like a straw man to me.

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Swap crops and feed 9 billion people

From Jacob van Etten.

Some demographic projections tell us that global population numbers will grow to 9 billion in 2100 and stabilize around this number. So how can people three generations down the line feed themselves, while still conserving biodiversity?

Lian Pin Koh offers a solution based on simple economic principles. Grow the most productive crop to produce cereal, oil or protein, and grow each crop where it grows best. He presents an interactive world map to demonstrate that no extra land needs to be taken into production to feed 9 billion people.

The results are interesting. Strikingly, Brazil is doing just fine. Just a bit more of rice and Brazilian agriculture is optimal. Other countries need to change drastically. North European countries need to switch from barley to wheat. Canada and Russia need to abolish wheat agriculture and adopt maize. West Africa and the Cono Sur needs to grow more rice but northern South America and the US need to grow more maize. Yields will go up automagically, as each crop is planted on land that is more suited to it, fulfilling the dream of the 1980s land use evaluators.

The study is still in preparation and no background info on the methodology is available yet. Transport costs and climate change do not seem to be taken into account. “Optimal” seems to refer to yields per hectare, not to labour and inputs. Overall, the trend seems to be towards more high-yielding crops, which also require more inputs. With more people, more labour is available. But other inputs, like water, are limited.

Another question would be why crop use is sub-optimal now. Is it trade barriers? Cultural preferences and agricultural traditions? Or is it economics, really?

There is of course more to conservation than making agriculture more efficient. Another study shows that intensifying land use does not in fact put a break on crop land expansion. Additional measures would be needed to ensure that more efficiency indeed stops crops taking over non-agricultural land, and impacting biodiversity.

Even so, this is an interesting thought experiment. In an ideal world, swapping crops is enough to raise crop production some 30%. Feeding 9 billion people suddenly appears a bit easier.