- Evaluation of Genetic Diversity of Sichuan Common Wheat Landraces in China by SSR Markers. “Our results suggested that Sichuan common wheat landraces is a useful genetic resource for genetic research and wheat improvement.” When is anything not?
- Identification and evaluation of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (l.) moench) germplasm from Eastern Kenya. “These untapped resources could be useful in crop improvement programmes and in food security.” See what I mean?
- Genetic assessment of maize landraces from former Yugoslavia. No, wait, don’t tell me… “The results revealed a significant genetic heterogeneity indicating that the analyzed landraces could be valuable sources of genetic variability.” There you go.
- The Role of Home Gardens in Household Food Security in Eastern Cape: A Case Study of Three Villages in Nkonkobe Municipality. People who keep home gardens eat and sell the stuff they grow in their home gardens. And yet they need to be empowered. Oh, and naturally “[f]indings of this study will be useful to governmental and non-governmental bodies involved in promoting food security in the rural households.”
- A modelling study of the role of marine protected areas in metapopulation genetic connectivity in Delaware Bay oysters. Gotta site your seed populations for restoration with care.
- Conservation Genetic Resources for Effective Species Survival (ConGRESS): Bridging the divide between conservation research and practice. An online tool for making decisions about conservation, including based on genetic data, such as the kind above. May even be applicable to agricultural biodiversity.
- A prioritized crop wild relative inventory to help underpin global food security. Well here’s one decision making tool that certainly is applicable to agrobiodiversity.
- The impact of agricultural practices on soil biota: A regional study. It’s not good.
- Sustainable agriculture: possible trajectories from mutualistic symbiosis and plant neodomestication. Gotta make use of those arbuscular mycorrhiza. Wonder if these guys have read the paper above though.
- Rethinking Land Grab Ontology. “Responsible investments in land acquisition” or “responsibly destroying the world’s peasantry”? Not sure why nobody looks at the agricultural biodiversity implications of all this.
- Extension of energy crops on surplus agricultural lands: A potentially viable option in developing countries while fossil fuel reserves are diminishing. Something to do on all that surplus land being sold off?
Sorghum from Eastern Kenya.
This takes me back a bit. I collected sorghum in these areas around 1980-81 and the samples had a preliminary evaluation by the FAO project at Katumani. The collections was divided into two. One to leave in Kenya at the Kitale genebank. This subsequently had a mechanical failure and the collection was lost (probably also lost was the finger millet collection rescued from Serere in Uganda by the Kenyan scientists working there when Serere closed). The duplicate collection was for the GTZ genebank project in Addis Ababa (no mechanical failure there!), now with the Ethiopian National Biodiversity Institute.
In the light of the then current fuss about `biopiracy’ the Kenyan Ministry responsible would not allow the duplicates out of the country and they quietly died in a colleague’s garage after I left Kenya.
I can find nothing in this paper (at first reading) as to where the samples were deposited and whether they were duplicated elsewhere.
A major point about the FAO Seed Treaty and the Global Crop Diversity Trust is to prevent this kind of repeated loss of valuable national germplasm. But this cannot be done without national support and it is self-evident that without such support national germplasm will be eroded.
Also, any journal should insist on information being given as to the fate of the experimental material cited in published papers: where it is stored and how it can be accessed by others (and by farmers, it they so wish).