- Sunberry. Taste-free! Toxin-loaded?
- CGIAR needs to do more “crop genetic improvement” for greater impact. Yeah, right.
- Heavy hitters to brief US Congress on Climate Change and Agriculture, June 16.
- Management more important than agricultural biodiversity in delivering ecosystem services? Say it isn’t so!
- Sorghum beer a big hit with England soccer fans.
- Turkeys domesticated for their feathers? This I gotta see.
- (Irish) public understanding of biodiversity.
IPBES — IPCC for biodiversity — agreed
I suppose this is a big deal. After a couple of years of negotiations, countries agreed in Korea yesterday to go ahead with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services — IPBES. You can read about it at Nature and the Guardian. Neither says anything about agriculture or wild relatives, although Professor Bob Watson, vice-chair of IPBES, says it will focus on “poverty alleviation, human well-being and sustainable development”. So far, so unsurprising. According to Nature, one of the problems for countries to agree to create IPBES was its scope, and it has been limited to “new topics” in biodiversity and ecosystem science.
That means we probably can’t look forward to an authoritative estimate of the extent of genetic erosion. Darn.
A plan to keep cacao alive in Ivory Coast, but for how long?
A long article in the Financial Times a few days ago described the woes of the Ivorian cacao industry. Fundamentally, it’s down to old, and therefore increasingly sick and unproductive, trees. And the quantity squeeze is forcing farmers to compromise on quality.
All this is important because Ivory Coast accounts for 39% of the world’s cacao production. A “chocolate crisis” is looming. And companies like Nestlé are worried. They employ a small army of agronomists, breeders and extensionists just to guarantee their supply of raw materials.
Hence their “Cocoa Plan” to replant 12 million trees (out of a total of 2 billion in the country) over the next decade at a cost of almost $100 million. A monumental task for a crop grown by hundreds of thousands of smallholders. The article does not go into detail on the varieties that are being used in the replanting, beyond saying that they are not GMOs and that the plantlets
…have already been nicknamed “Mercedes” for their supposedly upmarket quality. “They grow very, very quickly,” says Jebouet Kouassi, a 43-year-old who runs one of Nestlé’s nurseries in Ivory Coast.
Neither, alas, does the Cocoa Plan’s website. Elsewhere I found this:
The seedlings will be produced from high-yield and resistant varieties by somatic embryogenesis, which produce replicas of high performance cocoa trees, with high yield and high resistance to disease.
I hope that the narrowing of genetic diversity that this approach seems to imply will not store up problems for the future.
Why diversity is good, microbes edition
Soil agrobiodiversity helps plants deal with stress? And fungal diversity can do the same too? Sort of, anyway. 1 So many more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…
Nibbles: Niu kafa, Rice origins, Monsanto seed donation, Soils, Red junglefowl
- More on Roland’s quest for the biggest coconut in the world.
- Rice cultivation in Lower Yangtze dates back to 6th millennium, and took a millennium to establish itself.
- Yet more on Haiti’s “hybrid hate.”
- Soil scientist says soils are important.
- “ARKive is creating the ultimate multimedia guide to the world’s endangered species”: including a wild relative or two.