- Warty pig saved by genomics.
- So apparently there’s a Biodiversity Barometer. Via the Biodiversity Indicator Partnership.
- Traditional crops survive, but under threat, in Ethiopian highlands. And a whole issue of Farming Matters on why it’s important that they do survive.
- More on that purple wheat heirloom variety coming back from the brink.
- Going back to the original European strawberry. No, I’m not going to make any jokes about that.
- There’s going to be a Nobel for chefs. If they can make use of breadfruit, they’ll deserve it.
- Yes, sorghum rotis can taste good. And they’re good for you.
- Big Moringa shill makes case for next superfood :)
- Did I already say that FAO’s Nonwood Forest Products Newsletter seems to have been resurrected? Do subscribe.
- On my work blog, I say genebanks could be a bit more like supermarkets.
- Collecting trees.
`Work Blog’: Luigi – thanks for drawing attention to this – it’s a great. But I notice no comments are possible. Last week’s blog `Immigrants feed us all’ mentions the recent Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper (Khoury et al.) which certainly deserves comment.
This Khoury et al. paper claims “Yet the relative contributions of these different regions in the context of current food systems have not been quantified.” This is certainly not so: it was quantified by Kloppenburg and Kleinman and later by me (Wood, 1988). I came up with figures of 70.8% for Africa and 74.1% for the Americas (developing countries by value introduced crop production). For Asia the level is only 30.9% – the rice effect. But as with most science, we need to know not just what happened (the quantification), but why it happened.
The Khoury et al. paper fails in this: it continues to (almost) ignore the probable reason for the value of introduced crops: the idea of escape from co-evolved pests and diseases. This is the scientific heart of the study of the value of introduced crops. Unfortunately it is reduced to one sentence and one reference in the Khoury et al. 2016 paper, with a massive ignoring of previous and later papers. Whoever reviewed this paper had a blind spot.
Early papers identified the importance of crop introduction: De Candolle 1886, Crosby 1972, Masefield, 1972, Kloppenburg and Kleinman 1986, and several more.
Papers specifically relating the “crop introduction effect” to escape from pests and diseases: Anderson 1954, Purseglove 1963, Purseglove 1968 (p. 14), Jennings and Cock, 1977 [cited by Khoury et al.], Wood, 1988, Wood 2011 [Chapter 4 in our `Agrobiodiversity’ book]
I expressed policy concerns in my 1988 paper: “Lengthy negotiations would be needed to establish the payment of levies to an international fund for plant genetic resources. A failure to resolve the issue could lead to further restriction on the exchange of both improved varieties of germplasm from developed countries and landrace germplasm from developing countries.” … “Increased restrictions on germplasm movement would certainly first affect farmers in developing countries which lack strategic stockpiles of germplasm or the research capability to maintain their fragile agricultural production; that is, in all but the largest countries.”
Unfortunately for all countries, the people who negotiated the ITPGRFA sixteen years later had their heads in the clouds and thereby failed: “increased restrictions” are now the order of the day with no solution in sight. This would not have happened if all the scientific literature had been considered 20 years ago.
It is worth noting that the scientific basis of the `crop introduction effect’ is pure agroecology and also chemical-free – the control of crop pests and disease by natural means (big oceans between crop origins and crop production regions). Again unfortunately, the current crop of neo-agroecologists seems to be ignorant of the real ecology of crop introduction and continues to rely on traditional varieties and their supposed local adaptation.
Interestingly, Jennings and Cock (1977 p. 53) mention another feature that has proved to be a blind spot of neo-agroecology: mixed cropping in centres of origin versus pure stands, the latter “feasible due to fewer and less intense yield constraints” outside centres of origin. So neo-agroecologists, in their generic aversion to monocultures, have missed another ecological trick of Nature: mixed stands are more needed in centres of origin with high biotic pressures: in contrast, monocultures – away from centres of origin and therefore in conditions of fewer biotic limits to yield ability – are agroecologically-appropriate. Again, rice is an exception to mixed stands being needed I centres of origin: irrigated rice in its centre(s) of origin in Asia is almost entirely grown in monocultures.