Brainfood: Food system, Transformation of, Climate change effects on, Pandemic and, Future of, Effect of Green Revolution on, Mesoamerican CWR, Moroccan crop diversity, USA crop diversity, GM, Environmental behaviours

One Reply to “Brainfood: Food system, Transformation of, Climate change effects on, Pandemic and, Future of, Effect of Green Revolution on, Mesoamerican CWR, Moroccan crop diversity, USA crop diversity, GM, Environmental behaviours”

  1. “Utilize existing genetic diversity”

    This concludes: “Enthusiastically applying technology for technology’s sake to indigenous crops in domestication centers risks not only alienating traditional knowledge keepers, but also reinventing a wheel that has served farmers for millennia.”

    In contrast: “The absence of bacterial wilt resistant enset germplasm and other challenges such as long generation time of 9–14 years made traditional breeding programs unattractive to put effort on enset genetic improvement against bacterial wilt.”

    The first quote borders on the outrageous. In effect, “No GM for indigenous crops”. But indigenous crops are the precise ones that need GM. They suffer from indigenous pests and disease – the reason why 70% of crop production in Latin America and Africa is from introduced crops (no wild relatives present). So-called `traditional knowledge keepers’ have a limited ability to overcome this indigenous pest and disease pressure.

    My normal recommendation for enset would be to grow it somewhere else (Tropical America or Asia). But there it would meet cultivated bananas and probably get infected with something nasty in the way of Musa pests and disease.

    And for starch in Ethiopia, yet more introduced maize and potato (and continue with the wonderful Ethiopian teff).

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