Poor Farmer

Claire Provost in Addis Ababa The Ecologist 25th April 2014 Ethiopia leads the way in preserving crop seeds by engaging farming communities in the effort, and making the exchange of seeds part of village life and culture, reports Claire Provost. But now it's all at risk from a G8 plan to open Africa to corporate agriculture. Inside the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity's unassuming office complex in Addis Ababa, a series of vaults houses tens of thousands of seed samples tightly sealed into small envelopes and neatly catalogued in cold storage. It's a treasure trove of genetic diversity painstakingly assembled and set aside for future generations. Founded in 1976, Ethiopia's national seed bank is the oldest and largest of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. It's also part of a pioneering experiment to link scientists with small-scale farmers to collectively revive and conserve traditional, indigenous seeds in the face of drought and oth...

The University of Texas April 16, 2014 AUSTIN, Texas —The proportion of land used to cultivate shade grown coffee, relative to the total land area of coffee cultivation, has fallen by nearly 20 percent globally since 1996, according to a new study by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions. The study's authors say the global shift toward a more intensive style of coffee farming is probably having a negative effect on the environment, communities and individual farmers. "The paradox is that there is greater public interest than ever in environmentally friendly coffee, but where coffee production is expanding across the globe, it tends to be very intensive," says Shalene Jha, assistant professor in The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and lead author of the study published April 16 in the journal BioScience . Traditional shade grown coffee is cultivated under a diverse canopy of n...