A very sad Berry-Go-Round is up at Watching the World Wake Up. Anyway, if you’ve landed here from there, welcome.
Online platform comes up short on agrobiodiversity
Via LEISA’s Farm comes news of INFONET-BioVision,
…an online information platform tailored to the rural population in East Africa. It offers information on sustainable agriculture and ecological control of plant-, human- and animal- targeting pests and disease vectors.
Leave aside for a moment the unlikelihood of many rural people in East Africa being able to access such a platform. ((Perhaps extension workers will be the main audience?)) It does have a great deal of useful information on the agronomy of a large number of crops, including neglected ones, focusing on pest and disease control strategies. But there’s not as much as one might have hoped on the value of diversity. Although, for example, there’s a list of a few local and improved cultivars in the cassava section, I didn’t get the sense of genetic diversity management as a legitimate strategy for sustainability. On a par with “conservation tillage,” say. Pity.
Gates speaks
The Annual Newsletter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is online. Page 3 deals with agriculture. The emphasis is clear:
New seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase her farm’s output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist.
A big reason [for the Green Revolution’s failure there] is that African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions.
Since I grew up as a city boy and didn’t know anything about farming, I have been on a steep learning curve to understand things like fertilizer, drip irrigation, plant breeding, and which crops are best for which conditions.
Our optimism about technology is a fundamental part of the foundation’s approach. … Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda’s and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture.
But as Tom Philpott over at Gristmill points out:
The document never considers the complex history of agriculture in Africa; nor does it mull the social and ecological effects of industrial-style agriculture in the West and India. Are we still so enamored of our food system that we feel compelled to export it to Africa?
A more robust vision for that continent’s food future is laid out by the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development and U.N. Environmental Program. Called “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” [PDF], the report emerged in 2008 with the support of more than a dozen civil-society organizations throughout Africa.
The report concludes that organic and near-organic agriculture is ideally suited for millions of marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa — and build food security and soil fertility in unison.
Making better use of agricultural biodiversity and other solutions that do not involve what the Gates’ think of as technology is, I think, an even more exciting challenge that just trying to duplicate the Green Revolution again for Africa. And if Africa’s “widely varying climate conditions” were the problem (to say nothing of widely varying soils), how exactly will new seeds and fertilizers address that problem?
Gates also makes much of climate change, whose “negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem”. Does he really think he can breed, from scratch, fast enough to keep up? Or would he do better to devote at least some resources to making more and better use of existing agrobiodiversity in ways that can deliver the improved stability and size of harvests he says he wants?
Kenyan farmers reject technology solutions
Farmers are saying traditional crops were much better because they rarely ever lost everything even in the worst of droughts.
Well, well, well. That’s from a news piece in The Nation, explaining that many farmers are turning away from improved varieties of maize and beans because they don’t deliver a reliable harvest. Kenya does put a little money into its “orphan crops programme,” designed to rehabilitate traditional crops such as cassava, sorghum and millet; The Nation stops just short of calling for more research into these crops.
And that, in a microcosm, is the entire story of international investment in agricultural R&D. Not enough, on the wrong things, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Philip Pardey and his colleagues Julian Alston and Jennifer James have published a paper on Agricultural R&D Policy: A Tragedy of the International Commons that makes for pretty grim reading. They analyse the extent of the current failure to invest and the reasons for it, useful ammunition for anyone who needs to know these things. And they offer some possibilities for the future, which personally I found less than convincing.
The Nation noted that scientists need to move speedily, to prevent the current food crisis one day being remembered as a picnic. But not all scientists are the problem. They chase money, and they solve the problems the money asks them to solve. The money needs to sit up and pay attention.
Professor screws up on domestication?
I’m having a domestication research moment today, after reading an interview full of inaccuracies by a renowned professor (I won’t name names). After spotting two major screw ups in his logic and several outright wrong ‘facts’, I’ve decided to be more thorough and start digging into West African yam domestication and the process that leads to it.
Oh name names, Mathilda, please!
Incidentally, there’s lots of agrobiodiversity stuff, including on domestication and crop wild relatives, at the open-access journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications. Just found out about it at Cultural Landscapes.