Jeremy’s latest Eat This Newsletter tackles cassava, the chestnut, rice and pears. But his coolest find is a website called Flavour Lines, that allows you to find out, among other things, how far you are from a restaurant whose sign outside advertises biryani as opposed to pulao, or ravioli as opposed to pierogi.
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review. Traditional foods contribute to dietary diversity, micronutrient intake and food security. Nutrition policy should pay more attention to what people used to eat.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Soil-focused regenerative practices are associated with more diverse diets, through a mixture of production, income and market effects. Soil health has a dietary dimension.
- The Relationship among Food Environment Types, Diet, and Nutrition Outcomes in Women, Children, and Adolescents from Low- and Lower-Middle Income Countries. What surrounds people matters as much as what they grow: food environments influence dietary diversity and nutrition in complicated ways, but access to wild foods is usually a good thing.
- Allele-specific expression reveals complex regulatory divergence underlying fruit phenotypic differences between cultivated and wild tomato species. Wild tomato relatives harbour genetic variation for sugars, volatiles and other flavour traits that domestication left behind. A reminder that “improvement” can be a process of subtraction. Not nutrition you say? I bet flavour is connected with nutrition — in complicated ways.
- Large-scale phenotyping and multi-trait selection identify low-methane Napier grass accessions under contrasting environmental conditions. Napier grass accessions differ substantially in methane yield, digestibility and other traits. Feed diversity could help reduce livestock emissions without sacrificing everything else. Cows need better nutrition too.
The bit in between
We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process is what happens between those places.
A new IIED report, Nature Nurture: How to keep agrobiodiverse forest and farm systems alive in the modern world, looks at local collective community organisations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania and how they support on-farm conservation and use of crop diversity. In Tanzania, community seed banks lend seed to farmers, who return it after harvest; seed exchanges have brought previously little known local varieties into the banks. In the Philippines, a demonstration farm maintains traditional sweetpotato varieties for distribution. In Indonesia, producer groups run nurseries while much seed management remains in farmers’ hands.
Farmer-run seed banks, demonstration farms and nurseries give communities ways to organise for themselves the conservation and use of crop diversity. That’s great. But what if something goes wrong? A crop disappears from a village. A variety falls out of use in a district. A community seed bank loses its stock. And what if a variety being maintained in one place could be useful somewhere else, perhaps very far away?
This is where the bit in between comes into play.
Nature Nurture has very little to say about how seeds and knowledge move to and fro between farmers and community organisations on one side and formal genebanks on the other. It recognizes their complementarity, but deals with it in a single sentence: “While ex-situ conservation remains an important safeguard against genetic erosion, the farmer-led and Indigenous systems that actively sustain agrobiodiversity within living production landscapes must have greater recognition and investment.” That’s all true, but somehow insufficient.
The report does promise practical guidance for collective organisations in its next phase. How they can connect with national genebanks would be a good place to start. Meanwhile, though, national genebanks should be doing the same. Maybe by re-thinking their information systems, as I suggested a few days ago.
Two legends of agricultural transformation
Land sparing is a seductive story.
Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky land sharing business. Everybody wins.
A new paper in Agriculture and Human Values calls this a “policy legend”: a complicated and contested body of research gets turned into a simple, reassuring story about technology and intensification. The politics of who owns land, who benefits from intensification, what gets produced and where, and what happens to rural livelihoods very conveniently disappear from the equation.
But the other side of the debate has its own temptations. Agroecology as a movement is often explicit about context, politics and food sovereignty. Yet it too can occasionally shrink to something that’s cosily tidy: conventional agriculture is the problem, agroecology is the solution, here are some desirable practices, get farmers to switch.
Another new paper, this one in Ecological Economics, also makes that story look way too simple. And you know how we love that here. The authors look at 2,721 farms in six African countries and find very different starting points for the transition to agroecology, and different trajectories. The smallest farms tend to combine autonomy and income diversification; larger farms more often go for some crop-livestock integration; small and medium farms may put more land into legumes for soil health.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The way farmers make decisions is complicated. And I coincidentally came across a study in Food and Nutrition Bulletin that illustrates that rather well, albeit on a small scale. Surveys of 26 farmers in the Ecuadorian highlands found that they grew diversity for economic reasons, sure, but also for social, emotional or health and safety reasons. And, rather wonderfully, sometimes simply because they liked it.
Farm size, labour availability, markets, tenure, risk, access to inputs, knowledge, household objectives and yes, sheer aesthetics, all shape what farmers can do, are willing to do, and indeed eventually end up doing. Change one part of the system, and you can change the economics of the rest.
So why do we keep reaching for legends?
Simple stories are useful, I guess. They fit snugly into funding proposals, policy briefs and campaign slogans, and every camp needs something to organise around. Unfortunately, agriculture is way messier than the legends we tell about it.
Transition at CGN
Theo van Hintum, is moving on from his gig as Head of the CGN-Plant group, and the job is being advertised, albeit under a slightly different name. Theo has come up several times on the blog over the years. Which is not surprising, as he’s been a pillar of the global plant genebank community for decades. We wish him all the best in his new endeavours, and look forward to welcoming his successor.