Featured: Banana book

We don’t get many comments on Nibbles, but the book Diane Ragone points to is definitely worth noting.

Check out Angela Kepler & Frank Rust’s new book “The World of Bananas in Hawaii: Then and Now”.

Why we need crop wild relatives.
No, really, we need crop wild relatives.
The banana is in trouble.
Which is why we need to conserve banana wild relatives and landraces.
Lots of wild relatives are conserved in the IRRI genebank mentioned in this Guardian article on breeding low glycemic index and high protein rice. Some of them may even have been used in this work. May look that up one day.
I doubt that IITA used wild relatives in breeding these high quality cassava varieties, but there’s always a first time, and there may even be some in its genebank. I should probably look but I don’t have time for this rabbit hole today.
And livestock get conserved in genebanks too, though not as much as crops. I’m really not sure how many livestock wild relatives are in the world’s genebanks, but my guess is not many.
Farmers conserve crop (and livestock) diversity too, of course. And sometimes even their wild relatives.
It’s amazing what can be done from space to figure out what farmers are growing. This is an example of sunflower in Ukraine, but one day we’ll even be able to locate crop wild relatives, I’m sure.
To finish off, a reminder that we need conserved seed of wild species for more than just breeding: restoration too.