“Are oysters the sort of elitist, anachronistic foodstuff that should be consigned to history?” That’s the provocative question posed by an article in The Guardian’s food section today, by way of introducing tomorrow’s Whitstable Oyster Festival (July 24-30). And serendipity decreed that the answer would come on the very same day from Banjul in the Gambia, where a group of “women rely on oysters for their livelihoods and contribute to food security in a country that is heavily dependent on seafood for protein.” The workers at Ameripure Oysters and in the fisheries of Kent can probably relate to that, and they were also in the news today. Anachronistic indeed.
Nixing agrobiodiversity?
Richard Jonasse at Food First did a reasonable job a few days ago of rehearsing the old WEMA vs LEISA (let’s call it) dichotomy in agricultural development. He’s done it before, and so have we, ((And as luck would have it, here’s another example, just out.)) and I won’t go on any more about that. But I did want to say something about one of his assertions. In talking about the policies of USAID and the Gates Foundation, Jonasse says:
What these policies do not do is directly end African hunger by strengthening Africa’s farmers where they stand. This point was underscored recently when, after the Gates Foundation donated $270m (with a promise of $1Bn over the next few years) to CGIAR, Gates’ representatives nixed CGIAR’s agricultural biodiversity mega-programme, saying it was “unfocussed.” This logic represents precisely what is wrong with the Gates/USAID approach. Only an “unfocussed” low-tech approach that honors biological and cultural diversity is likely to be successful in Africa.
Well, that may well be, but the SciDevNet piece to which he links to support that “unfocussed” comment by a “Gates’ representative” doesn’t do that at all. What “Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of agricultural policy and statistics at the Gates Foundation, told the Global Conference for Agricultural Research Development (GCARD) (28—31 March)” is that the megapgrogrammes, as then constituted, “[b]ecause they are so fuzzy … are not likely to generate enthusiasm for increased funding.” All the megaprogrammes, note, not just the agricultural biodiversity one. The agrobiodiversity megaprogramme was indeed “nixed,” but I can find no comment by a Gates Foundation rep on it, either for or against. And anyway, everything still seems to be up in the air on these megaprogrammes. You can follow the CGIAR’s change process on their website and blog.
Nibbles: Cassava virus, Peru’s Potato Park, Marula, Taimen, Meetings, Cornish fruits and veg
- New cassava varieties saving Zanzibar. Good to hear, though as ever one worries about what’s happened to the local landraces.
- Alder’s photos of the Potato Park. Do follow her travels around South America in search of agrobiodiversity.
- Namibia looks for other marula products.
- Saving the taimen in Mongolia. That would be a fish. A mighty fish.
- Interesting Indian symposia: wild fruits; “lifestyle floriculture.” Oh, to have more information.
- “Gariguette strawberries are an old variety and are non-licensed.” Crazy, eh?
Looking for leimotifs in the early history of wheat and rice
There are two papers out just now which review in detail archaeobotanical and genetic data to elucidate the early history of crops. Dorian Fuller and numerous co-authors do it for Asian rice (Oryza sativa) ((Fuller, D., Sato, Y., Castillo, C., Qin, L., Weisskopf, A., Kingwell-Banham, E., Song, J., Ahn, S., & Etten, J. (2010). Consilience of genetics and archaeobotany in the entangled history of rice Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2 (2), 115-131 DOI: 10.1007/s12520-010-0035-y)), Hakan Özkan and others do it for emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides). ((Özkan, H., Willcox, G., Graner, A., Salamini, F., & Kilian, B. (2010). Geographic distribution and domestication of wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides) Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution DOI: 10.1007/s10722-010-9581-5)) And Fuller actually also comments on the emmer paper on his blog. ((Which is called The Archaeobotanist and is well worth following. In fact, I cannot resist linking to something else that Fuller has pointed to recently, a fascinating Science profile of Dr Dolores Piperno, who has pretty much single-handedly “revolutionized views of early agriculture in the Americas” through her use of microscopic remains of phytoliths and starch grains.))
In such situations, my first instinct is to look for commonalities, rather than get lost in the specifics. ((Is this evidence of some personality disorder? No, don’t tell me.)) Certainly, the occasional difficulty of reconciling archaeobotanical and genetic data comes up in both reviews. Actually there’s a third paper out which looks at that too, suggesting that “genetic and archaeological studies represent complementary perspectives on domestication, each highlighting a different facet of this complex problem.” ((Gross, B., & Olsen, K. (2010). Genetic perspectives on crop domestication Trends in Plant Science DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2010.05.008)) Complexity is a word that recurs a lot, in fact. Here’s Fuller: “Asian rices have had a complex history.” And here’s Özkan: “The spread of domestic emmer would have been extremely complex…”
But the really interesting question to me is whether there are similarities within the complexity. As Tolstoy might have asked, are the early histories of different crops complex each after their own fashion? Fuller summarizes the emmer story as one of “multiple starts of cultivation, gradual domestication, but the possible predominance of one domesticated line at the end of the process,” and there certainly are some echoes of that in rice. But I want to focus on one little series of events or processes that occurs in both rice and emmer, in each case with its peculiarities, but nevertheless comparable.
Cultivated emmer (Triticum dicoccon) was developed from its wild progenitor (T. dicoccoides) in south-eastern Turkey. ((Perhaps in one of that country’s Important Plant Areas?)) It then spread to the north-east, where it came into contact with wild Aegilops tauschii. Somewhere in the corridor between Armenia and the Caspian Sea, hybridization between the two gave rise to hexaploid bread wheat from tetraploid emmer. Well, something kind of similar also happened in rice. Fuller’s paper has a nice diagram summarizing the relationship between japonica and indica rices. Simplifying wildly, japonica arose in China from wild Oryza rufipogon. It was then taken to India, where it came into contact with cultivated proto-indica rices and also the wild species from which that was derived (O. nirvana). Hybridization and back-crossing eventually led to fully indica varieties. A crop develops in one place, then moves somewhere else, where it interacts with something, leading to the development of a somewhat different crop.
Now, I’m not sure whether the differences in this process, in particular the fact that polyploidy was involved in the emmer case but not rice, are more important than the similarities. But I wonder if the domestication and spread of crops can perhaps be broken down into a series of similar tropes, or maybe leitmotifs, I’m not sure what one would call them. At the very least it might help people like me make sense of — and try to remember, and keep straight — the complexities.
Dangerous foods round-up
Playing follow-up this morning. Just noticed a couple of papers that deal with topics we’ve been considering here over the past couple of weeks. Remember the post about sorghum beer in Africa from a few days back? Well, it turns out it’s not all good news. There had to be a catch, right? And, following our discussion of a paper on the chemical ecology of cassava, there’s a vivid reminder of why detoxifying those tubers is still so important in some parts of Africa. ((BTW, via a comment by Dirk on the original cassava post, I have learned of the existence of a Cassava Cyanide Diseases and Neurolathyrism Network (CCDNN). Thanks, Dirk.))