Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Department of Very Cool: Luigi’s presentation on The role of ex situ crop diversity conservation in adaptation to climate change was featured on the home page of SlideShare today.
Course, it might be gone by tomorrow, so you’ll just have to trust me on this. At this very moment 65 people have seen it. Go, watch, boost his figures. Congratulations to Luigi.
Just how far are we from the efficient and effective global system of genebanks that has been on the horizon since at least 1996? Maybe a little closer, thanks partly to efforts by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Bioversity International to help all those myriad genebanks and their managers to forge a common position. Five years after the Trust began, two of its staff 1 and a colleague from Bioversity have published an assessment of where things stand. 2 Bottom line: Good effort, could try harder.
The report is based on 18 crop strategies and 8 regional strategies, undertaken by the Trust in concert with shed-loads of experts in an attempt to collate what is known and what isn’t. From their consideration of all extant strategies the authors isolate eight themes. In their paper they treat each in detail. I have the luxury of picking cherries.
Regeneration is probably the greatest single threat to the safety of wheat accessions held in globally important genebanks.
And what holds for wheat in globally important genebanks holds for other crops and other genebanks too. Keeping what you have alive is crucial, but it isn’t just the lack of skilled staff that is holding things up. Research is needed to know how best to regenerate and multiply some species, especially wild relatives. And of course while regeneration is the sine qua non of a functioning genebank, it is also fundamental to so many other activities, like having enough stuff to send out, gathering the characterization and evaluation data that make stuff worth sending out, and cleaning up the diseases that make stuff not worth sending out. So regeneration is the number one priority.
Number two, for me, has to be information systems, although it ranks No. 5 in the paper. No need to go into details, except to say that the only way out of genebank database hell is to build information systems that allow different searching styles and different social styles alike to find what they are looking for.
And finally, a little something on user priorities. Information plays a part here. The paper says that:
The greatest constraint on utilization of plant genetic resources by researchers, taxonomists, breeders, farmers, and other users of germplasm presented in the strategies is the lack of accession level information … especially for useful traits.
Well, yes. And am I mistaken, or is this a highly disguised pat on the back?
In order to increase use, there is a continuing need for the creation of greater awareness among policy makers and the general public of the value of crop diversity collections and the global interdependence on those collections for agricultural research.
E non solo, as they say in Italy.
We nibbled it a couple of weeks ago, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. Nominations for the Equator Prize close on 28 February, so if you want to be considered, get going. For the record, agricultural biodiversity can win!
This looks interesting. A PhD thesis has demonstrated that “a peasant-friendly policy combined with opportunities to buy freeholds” are “the two key reasons for … major agricultural developments”. That sounds about right. Without title to their land, which allows them to seek credit and to benefit from investment, and without policies that support their efforts, how can peasants improve their lot? But hang on. Pablo Wiking-Faria’s thesis relates to Sweden between 1700 and 1900. Could it be relevant elsewhere? Could it be relevant today? Probably.
MAT’s post on the cultural consequences of corn colour, which we nibbled earlier today, has been brought to my attention. Immodesty forces me to note that we have explored similar byways here ourselves. Luigi experienced first hand contempt for yellow corn among a small sample of ethnic Africans. MAT’s assertion that “corn meal in the United States is yellow,” is undone by the clear north-south divide in preferences, noted here. 3 The whole business of yellow foods’ nutritional value is touched on in many places, not least here. And, of course, there’s the whole orange-fleshed sweet potato saga. Somehow, these “soft” ideas about culture seldom get the respect they deserve when talk turns to improving staple crops.