That’s the title of an IFPRI project funded by the Gates Foundation which aims to document success stories in agricultural development. We mentioned it here before, when it was just being launched. There are a couple of agrobiodiversity examples among the case studies, including maize in Africa, mungbean in Asia and diet diversification in Bangladesh.
The orchids that fell through the cracks
My sincere apologies to Ted MacRae, who submitted a blog post about Great Plains ladies-tresses to the Berry Go Round carnival we hosted here a couple of days ago. Stupidity made me leave it off. Sorry Ted.
Cutting down (some of) Kenya’s eucalypts
You may remember I threw a bit of a hissy fit some time back when my mother-in-law was forced to cut down some of her eucalypt plantation as part of a Kenyan government effort to combat the drought that was plaguing the country (it has since broken in a big way, causing much flooding in places). Well, I was there at Christmas and saw the result for myself, and what really got me was not so much what she was forced to do, but the fact that the order is not being not uniformly applied. Have a look.
Now, a year ago I would not have been able to take that picture because of the thick stand of blue gums I would have been standing in. Gone now, of course, though some are beginning to re-sprout. But the question is: why weren’t the big-shot owners of the huge tea farm on the other side of the valley forced to cut down their eucalypts? They’re even closer to the stream than ours were.
Anyway, some good did come out of all this. More on that later.
A lot of plants, not much meat and maximum variety
The Oxford Real Farming Conference – January 5th 2010
A guest post from our friend Richard Sanders.
Every year in early January “the establishment” of British agriculture gathers in Oxford for the Oxford Farming Conference; two days of debate on their selection of the farming issues of the day. This year the massed ranks of land agents, company agronomists, financial advisers, supermarket buyers, grain traders (and some farmers) busied themselves with debate on the retirement age of farmers and market prices in a global economy.
Frustrated at the lack of engagement with the true failings of modern agriculture, a fringe event launched this year — The Oxford Real Farming Conference. Its organisers, including biologist and writer Colin Tudge and journalist Graham Harvey, are convinced that the Earth’s natural resources are easily able to provide a good, healthy diet for everyone living on the planet today — and everyone likely to be living on it 50 years from now and beyond. All it will take, they say, is an agriculture based on principles of sound biology rather than economic dogma.
“Current farming methods are clearly failing. They are over-dependent on fossil fuels; they damage soils and deplete scarce water resources; they degrade everyday foods; they reduce biodiversity and squander precious wildlife; they pollute our global environment. They are part of a global food system that is at the mercy of speculators and is every bit as precarious as the world banking system,” says Colin Tudge.
“Quite simply, high-input, industrial agriculture is incapable of reform. Rather than feed people, its aim is to serve the interests of global chemical, trading and investment corporations. Far from creating a secure supply of high-quality food, today’s agribusiness can be counted on to obstruct progress.”
As an alternative, the conference heard Professor Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Centre extol the sustainable virtues of agro-forestry and composite cross populations of cereals over what has become “traditional” mono-cropping.
The call went out for the abandonment of energy-dependent nitrogen fertilisers; the replacement of rampant resource depletion with farming methods that work with rather than against eco-systems; and an end to the steady rationalisation and concentration of power in food processing and distribution.
“Feeding people is easy,” says Colin Tudge. “We must move to a recipe of a lot of plants, not much meat, maximum variety.”
By accident (or design?) the conference was held in the very same room (The Old Library of the University Church) that witnessed the inaugural meeting of the British aid agency Oxfam in 1942. That move was triggered by the need to supply food to starving women and children in German-occupied Greece. Auspicious or what?
Plant exploration is not dead
Not that we ever thought it was, but there are souls out there who seem to think that we already have in hand all the agricultural biodiversity we’ll ever need, so there’s no need to hunt for more or bring it back alive. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service yesterday announced its seed-hunting plans for 2010.
[W]alnuts from Kyrgyzstan, grasses from Russia, and carrots and sunflowers from fields across the Southeastern United States.
These are just some of roughly 15 expeditions that the USDA sends out each year to look for potentially useful crops and their wild relatives. There’s more in a longer article.