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Beyond the staples

I haven’t been following the Millennium Villages literature — scientific and popular — quite as assiduously as I should, but what I have read does seem to focus quite strongly on the staple crops. No doubt a sustainable increase in the production of staples is necessary to combat hunger in Africa. But is it sufficient? The impression I have taken away from my reading is that that is not a question that is accorded high priority in this literature. If I’m wrong about this, I would welcome being set right. In any case, it came as a nice surprise to read the following passage in “Tripling crop yields in tropical Africa,” a recent article in Nature Geoscience by Prof. Pedro Sanchez, one of the moving forces behind the Millennium Villages project. 1

An increase in staple crop production is only a first step towards reducing hunger in tropical Africa. The provision of wider nutritional needs, such as more protein and adequate vitamins and trace elements, coupled with a reduction in disease, is also necessary.

Unfortunately that is not followed by a call to harness agrobiodiversity to provide those wider nutritional needs. But it does open an interesting door. A door that Bonnie McClafferty of HarvestPlus had no compunction about going through at SciDev.net a couple of days back:

The enormous challenge of micronutrient malnutrition is best addressed in the long run through poverty alleviation, economic development, education, women’s empowerment, access to adequate healthcare and dietary diversification, among other things.

Now, her defence of biofortification against the charge of medicalizing micronutrient deficiency sounds a lot like “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” which is a bit much, as in fact if anything it has been the good that’s been the enemy of the best in this game. Surely a lot more money has been going into biofortification than into dietary diversification — where, after all, is the latter’s equivalent of HarvestPlus? But it is good to see the importance of diverse diets — and by implication agrobiodiversity — at least recognized. Perhaps the Millennium Villages project could now plan some interventions around local vegetables and fruits?

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The Three-hundred-variety mango of Malihabad

Another reflection on a remarkable Indian mango tree from our friend Bhuwon Sthapit of Bioversity International.

It is hard to believe that a farmer can have as a hobby the grafting of multiple varietal scions of interesting and unique mango diversity on to a single tree. I certainly did not believe it. Until I saw the orchard of Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan in Malihabad. There he maintains several trees with many varieties grafted onto them as sources of scions for his mango nurseries. A good and reliable source of scions is essential to run a successful and credible mango nursery, but to have a conventional scion block is expensive in terms of maintenance and land.

The son of the magician grafter, Najmi, showed me two very remarkable mango trees. One is said to be 100 years old and is named Al-Muqarrar. It has had more than 300 varieties of mango skilfully grafted onto it by Najmi’s father father. The other, younger tree has more than 150 mango genotypes grafted on to it. Each branch looks like a different tree! Both trees are bearing fruits of different colour, shape and size, and at different times.

Born in 1945, Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan does not have any academic horticultural degrees, but he is widely renowned in India for his skills and knowledge in multiple grafting on a single tree. He was awarded the title of Udhyan Pandit (Professor of the Orchard) by a former President of India. He has also presented a mango tree bearing 54 varieties to the current President for the premises of the Mughal Garden of Rastrapati Bhavan. He has been acknowledged by many high-profile visitors from abroad and also decorated with the Padamashri award. His name is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records for his grafting feats.

Abdullah Nursery is famous in Malihabad and throughout India for Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan’s innovations, and markets saplings of commercial varieties to such distant places of Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Unlike government research stations, Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan uses ground layering for his propagation for most commercial saplings, and veneer or wedge grafting in special cases. He has also grafted a guava tree that flowers and fruits all year round, which is another attraction for the nursery.

This innovation borne out of local need is a promising way for nurseries to maintain many scions at relatively low cost. However, this can be a high risk practice, because many varieties depend on one mother tree’s survival. It is thus important to have adequate safety duplication or maintain some scion material trees separately. Multiple variety grafting can also be used as an attraction in agrotourism, and for innovative marketing of diversity in urban and home gardens. This will create a new market for nursery growers and raise public interest in the diversity of mangoes. This activity has been conceptualized in the context of the UNEP/GEF project Conservation and Sustainable Use of Tropical Fruit Tree Diversity in India.

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Comments on Nibbles

Regular commenter Dirk Enneking suggests we rethink Nibbles:

Some sort of interaction with specific nibbles through a comment function could help your readers to turn your nibblings into a more interesting dia- or poly/multi-logue i.e. you’d get some reaction.

It’s an interesting idea. You can, of course, comment on any day’s worth of Nibbles, although I admit is isn’t obvious how. You have to go to the Nibbles Archive, by clicking on the link for All that condensed goodness in the sidebar on the right. Then you click on the Nibbles’ headline, and that brings up the complete entry with a comment form below. Cumbersome, I know, which is why we don’t get many comments on Nibbles and why Dirk’s idea is worth thinking about.

The thing is, Nibbles have been through many incarnations. To begin with, each Nibble was a separate post, which made them easy enough to comment on, but they got in the way of the main flow of longer posts. Then we moved them off into the sidebar, still as individual posts, but on a busy day older ones could easily disappear. Now we have a single post for Nibbles each day, but we still have it boxed off and separate. We could restore Nibbles to the main flow, and ensure that that post stays at the top of the content each day. Or we could rethink completely and go back to individual entries, one per Nibble.

I’m working on adding a Comment link directly to the boxed-off Nibbles, but in the meantime it would be interesting to know what you think. I’ve always thought that the place to comment on Nibbles it at the item they link to, but maybe that’s misguided. Lots of Nibbles end up on Twitter; maybe that’s the place for the conversation? Let us know, using the exceedingly simply Comment link below.

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Clean water and indigenous knowledge

SciDev.net reports that prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp) can be used in a simple process to remove 98% of bacteria from dirty water. 2 That would be good news for poor people who may be surrounded by prickly pears, but lack clean water. Alas, (some) poor people don’t want pure water.

“Stomach and intestinal infections are considered a way of cleansing the body, and are not conceived as diseases.”

Oh the dilemma. Preserve their indigenous knowledge, or offer them better health? 3

Strangely, among other communities, on another continent, indigenous knowledge of the water purifying properties of Moringa seeds is just plain confused. Some people know all about it, others believe that more than three Moringa trees are “a source of misfortune that brings poverty and death”. But not from water-borne diseases, perhaps.

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And, in the industrial corner …

Everyone’s jumping into the industrial versus organic fray (again) with most of the usual suspects making most of the expected noises. One contribution, though, did surprise me somewhat. I have a lot of time for Matt Ridley’s writing, and I’m looking forward to his new book The Rational Optimist. At his blog devoted to the book he has a post on “organic’s footprint” that is either deliberately misleading or else accidentally thoughtless.

One foolishness that a commenter there has already picked up on is this:

Given that … it takes just about the same calories of fossil fuels to get an organic lettuce from a Californian farm to a plate in New York — 4,600 versus 4,800 (numbers from Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma) — can we please have a little less preaching of organic’s holiness?

Talk about a straw man. Who, seriously, imagines that an organic lettuce from California is a good substitute for an industrial lettuce from California in New York? No-one I know, apart maybe from some organic marketeers, who are no better than marketeers anywhere.

Ridley’s main point seems to be that cereal yields per hectare have risen steadily since the 1960s.

That remarkable achievement is mostly down to the fact that most farmers now get extra nitrogen straight from the air, via ammonium factories, rather than from plants, dung and dead fish — the `organic’ way.

If the world was fed with organic food, it follows, we would need to cultivate or otherwise exploit far, far more land to get the plants, dung and dead fish to produce the same amount of food. As I submit to being preached at by organic farmers about their virtue, this fact keeps creeping into my head. Wholly organic farming means no rainforests or it means hunger and high food prices.

A phalanx of straw men. Never mind about the energy needed to get that nitrogen from the air. He could perhaps persuade me to be optimistic about that, even though things aren’t moving too fast on that front. Water? Other energy needs? Why not go the whole rational hog, and press for the Müller solution. Move all agriculture to where it does best, and give it what it needs to deliver. You could grow all the food that 12 billion people would need, with double today’s meat consumption, in a fraction of the area currently occupied by agriculture (see maps in this paper).

I’m not going to dissect Ridley’s post point by point. It isn’t worth it, and Gary has already provided the excellent synthesis that Luigi craved. To quote:

Good farmers are never “organic”. They also aren’t conventional as they are characterized by “organic” growers. The caricatures are devised by “organic” advocates to demonize other growers in the hope of somehow elevating themselves. Good farmers are concerned with producing good food and doing good land management so that they and their descendants can earn a living farming in future. The production methods they use are evaluated by that standard rather than a set of taboos or ungrounded regulations. They are realists who will use any available method that helps them achieve their objectives.

To which I would add that it isn’t only the organic farmers who demonize others. Bagmen for conventional agriculture are just as capable of demonization, as Ridley so eloquently demonstrates. But I’ll give Gary the last word, for now.

There’s a lot of room for improvement. We can get very much better at agriculture. The sterile conflict between “organic” and other growers does not help. We need to move beyond organic to a more reality based agriculture that is grounded in knowledge rather than superstition.