A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE by researchers from the UPF Culture, Archaeology and Socio-Ecological Dynamics Research Group (CaSEs) provides a global assessment of traditional small-scale farming practices for three of the world's most important drought-tolerant species: finger millet, pearl millet, and sorghum.
Finger millet, pearl millet, and sorghum are primary staple crops in drylands, and their production dates back more than 5,000 years. However, compared to other crops, the production of millet and sorghum has progressively decreased in the last 50 years. In the current context of climate change and rising levels of aridity around the world, research into local practices and traditional crops is critical.
Traditional ecological knowledge provides a very important source of information since it encompasses the exploitation of locally available resources, and is the result of processes of long-term adaptation to the environment. The authors note that traditional practices to increase crop yields are based on renewable resources, contrary to the widespread and short-term solutions often used by supranational institutions, which cause significant damage to both crop biodiversity and soil conservation. These traditional practices enable increased productivity and minimize crop failure, without sacrificing long-term sustainability and resilience.
In their research, the authors build and test models that show the interaction of ecological and geographic variables, which serve to explain traditional agricultural practices and the variability of existing systems in this field, as well as map the possible cultivation areas of finger millet, pearl millet, and sorghum on a global level. The researchers have chosen to use a comparative global approach, which allows for simplifying complex ethnographic data since they have reduced intracultural variability through generalizations based on the most common practices.
For this reason, they have used the ethnographic data available in the eHRAF World Cultures database as the main source of information. The eHRAF World Cultures database contains a large number of documents that describe activities derived from traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) from around the world, data that come from ethnographic studies carried out unevenly during the last two centuries.
Despite the inevitable distortion generated by the use of data collected under different theoretical and methodological perspectives over more than 150 years of ethnographic research, the eHRAF database continues to be one of the most effective tools for conducting global comparative research, due to the wealth of information it supplies.
The models presented in the study, which include various environmental predictors in their design, simplify the relationships and interactions between humans and the environment and can, therefore, be useful to understand the underlying general dynamics involved in the study and development of traditional agricultural systems.
The study offers an alternative view on possible ways to integrate traditional knowledge into scientific and political programs, with the aim of providing solutions for food security in low and middle-income arid areas. The authors believe that their paper is a timely and valuable contribution to this debate, as it provides new data on smallholder practices at the intersection of traditional ecological and academic knowledge.
