- Maize boffins move on to RNA. Hard row to hoe.
- The coolness of hybrids. No, not the cars. Includes crop wild relatives.
- Bioversity makes the case that cacao is charismatic. Hard row to hoe.
- IITA tries to crowdsource banana production data. Hard row to hoe. BTW, why not include variety information? Well, maybe they will.
- Jatropha rebooted?
- The history of barley water. Surprisingly weird.
- Cory Bradshaw’s presentation on the global erosion of ecosystem services. A quick look reveals little on that often overlooked service: the provision of diversity for agriculture.
- The importance of coca in Andean culture.
- Chinese medicinal herbs doing just fine in North Carolina.
- FAO hunger report parsed by The Guardian.
As to the Bradshaw presentation on ecosystem services: biodiversity conservation has moved hard in the past couple of years to `ecosystem services’ to justify further investment. Is `the provision of diversity for agriculture’ an ecosystem service? The relevant ecosystem service seems to be `provision of food and commodities’ – of course, a provision grossly neglected by the whole CBD process and of immediate and vital importance. And is the person-in-the-street aware of a need for diversity for agriculture? With a few clicks of a mouse I can buy many hundreds of different varieties of seed for probably more than a hundred crops and the range is expanding by the year.
As this became a `featured comment’ on access to seed in remote places I cast my mind back to collecting in Africa. Rural markets had a grain section – which farmers could use to replace their seed, and very often a vegetable seed section, for small quantities of seed that was not easily produced on farm – the like of carrots and brassicas and some of the unique African vegetables. Tomatoes and onions and some of the other African vegetables are easy for home seed production: one danger is people trying to regrow hybrid seed, fairly common. No particular bottleneck there: where there is a demand, someone will meet it. Also, in Kenya, the District Agricultural Shows had displays of a fantastic range of field and garden seed (available for purchase at the end of the show)
In India the big seed merchants had of small lots of vegetable seed, and welcome gimmicks like a calendar with a small packet of vegetable seed to be planted each month – with crops I had never heard of (after 30 years as an economic botanist).
It will be difficult to whip up a demand for a more abstract concept of agricultural diversity (especially as an `ecosystem service’) when there is already a wide range of seed available that you can smell and touch and grow and exchange with relatives and even steal over the fence from neighbours (guilty!).