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A tale of two conferences

A seminar organized by the International Food and Trade Policy Council somehow escaped our attention.

A group of renowned international policymakers, agribusiness executives, farm and NGO leaders and scholars met in Salzburg to examine the key global challenges facing the agricultural sector in the 21st century and analyze the role of food and agricultural trade in the midst of these challenges.

Talking about Food & Environmental Security: the role of food and agricultural trade policy, I’m sure some interesting things must have been said, but it is awfully hard to tell. None of the press coverage makes for easy reading.

The question that interests us, of course, is whether any of the assembled luminaries gave air to the possibility, as Luigi put it, that “to solve the complex problem faced by agriculture we need a diversity of solutions, and that nothing need be off the table in our efforts to put food on the table”?

Then comes notice of the 1st International IFOAM Conference on Organic Animal and Plant Breeding. This shindig takes place in New Mexico 1 in late August 2009, and

provides for the opportunity to revive traditional knowledge from the global North and South and connect it with the current international organic research. Through the fusion of traditional breeding knowledge and newly developed organic breeding methods, there is a great opportunity of intercultural learning and also valuing knowledge which was kept through generations for the well-being of communities.

Again, I’ve got to ask: will other approaches be given a fair hearing? We’d welcome a report from anyone who attends.

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Three different ways of looking at Africa

I ran the Last of the Wild dataset I talked about yesterday past our friend Andy Nelson, he of the accessibility map, and his reaction was that there was a quick paper, or at least an MSc thesis, in comparing that map with his and with the product of the GLOBIO project. Well, here’s what Africa looks like according to the three different methodologies, just to give you a taste. Quite similar, at first look, though we’ll have to wait for that MSc to be sure, I guess. Now, the question is, can such data be used to predict things like the amount of agrobiodiversity in farmers’ fields?
africa-wild

africa-time

africa-globio

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Fermented diversity

Luigi’s post on The glut of bugs in your gut opened a window here on a neglected aspect of biodiversity: the bacteria associated with certain foods and those associated with digesting that food. In all the background murmuring about probiotics and prebiotics, I’ve been hearing a lot of good sense from Seth Roberts. He’s the self-experimenter who devised the Shangri-La Diet (which isn’t a diet but a way of regulating appetite) and of late he’s been blogging more and more about fermented foods.

The things Roberts has noted are plentiful and diverse — I won’t summarize them here — but I can say that I’ve yet to meet a fermented food, in the widest sense, that I didn’t like. I also like playing with a few ferments myself. Of course there are fermentation fanatics, not just for the process as a whole but for particular “miracle mushrooms” and the like. 2 And that puts some peoples’ backs up. But there is also probably a lot of good sense in making use not only of a diversity of ingredients, but also in a diversity of ways of processing them, outside and inside the body.

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The Bourne ultimatum

You’ve got to hand it to National Geographic: they do get some good writers. I don’t know who Joel K. Bourne Jr is, but his piece on The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty, which is just out, is a tour de force. Every hot-button issue in agriculture for the past few years gets a name-check. Last year’s food riots, the likely effects of climate change, the last Green Revolution and the next one AGRA is working towards in Africa, farmer suicides in India, the Millennium Villages and Malawi’s subsidies programme, the IAASTD, biotech and ecoagriculture. They’re all there. 3 And they’re woven into a coherent narrative that includes pithy quotes from the DGs of CGIAR Centres and African extension workers, Malthus and Norman Borlaug. Plus you can read the whole thing in no more than twenty minutes.

So why am I depressed? Because after a balanced discussion — rooted in concrete examples — of the pros and cons of the contrasting approaches advocated by the Millennium Villages on the one hand and the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project on the other, this is the conclusion Bourne reaches:

Regardless of which model prevails — agriculture as a diverse ecological art, as a high-tech industry, or some combination of the two — the challenge of putting enough food in nine billion mouths by 2050 is daunting. Two billion people already live in the driest parts of the globe, and climate change is projected to slash yields in these regions even further. No matter how great their yield potential, plants still need water to grow. And in the not too distant future, every year could be a drought year for much of the globe.

Why, oh why reduce the discussion to the question of which model will prevail? Why does either have to prevail? Why not instead build on that lonely throwaway phrase — “a combination of the two.” What an opportunity missed to say that to solve the complex problem faced by agriculture we need a diversity of solutions, and that nothing need be off the table in our efforts to put food on the table.

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Baobab to be the next coffee

What’s happening at the NY Times? Following yesterday’s op-ed on “hidden hunger” 4 there’s one today on a plant that’s a neglected but very important source of micronutrients (among other things) in parts of semi-arid Africa — the baobab. The writer — an anthropologist — fears that the recent opening of the European market to baobab fruit pulp products 5 will lead to the clearing of “precious forests or farmland” to establish agribusiness plantations.

Although local people would probably find jobs on such farms, their ability to harvest or purchase the baobab themselves would be limited. They wouldn’t be able to pay as much as London dealers could. This means that some Africans could lose a source of household wealth, an important part of their diet and an essential pharmaceutical resource.

Even the spectre of genetic modification is raised.

These possibilities — not to mention the threat of corruption, poor wages and genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity — are not random predictions. Africa is no stranger to the overexploitation of its natural resources. But the solution isn’t necessarily to cut the baobab off from international markets. Regulations could be put in place to protect the tree, its environment and the people who depend on it — and still allow for profitable production.

The coffee trade is then presented as a model.

It’s clear that many consumers are willing to pay more for fairly traded coffee — which costs enough to provide the growers a decent wage for their labor. This bottom-up pricing should be applied to the baobab market, even if it means European health nuts have to pay a lot for their smoothies.

Well, it’s all a little premature, of course. Baobab is many decades from being in even remotely comparable a situation to coffee. There will not be industrial baobab plantations for many many years, if ever. And as for “genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity,” I for one will not be losing any sleep over that. If I were a baobab entrepreneur I’d concentrate on local and regional markets for now, identify superior genotypes maybe, look into sustainable harvesting practices and experiment with different value-addition strategies. I’d also look at establishing small, village-level nurseries: it’s already been done for fresh leaf production. The European market — and all those health nut hipsters with their smoothies — can wait a while.