- Maize in the Dominican Republic 1500 years ago. Luigi comments: I see that and raise you wheat in Turkey 8,500 years ago.
- CTA announces news aggregator service. Yes, we feature. Via.
- World Bank country data mashed up with Google Maps. Not as useful as it might be.
- Organic farming researchers meet in Modena. Not all sweetness and light, though.
- BBC podcast on the troubles affecting bees.
- Breeders told to develop really hairy plants to combat warming.
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes list of world’s biggest science projects. No comment.
- CIP documents genebank use cases on youtube.
- The perils of herding zebu in Madagascar.
- Ancient Egyptians made cool ropes, but of what?
Give ’em a phone
Why don’t coffee growers get more for their beans when world prices are higher? First off, I had to admit, I didn’t know that they didn’t. But apparently even against a background of rapidly rising prices, growers do not get much more. A new study of coffee growers in Uganda explains that rising prices brings out so-called “ddebe boys”, part-time coffee traders who “insert themselves between farmers and larger permanent traders and mills”. The ddebe is a 20 kg tin that they use to purchase coffee from farmers who are ignorant of the true market prices. The obvious solution is to give farmers access to current market information.
Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill, who conducted this study say they don’t know whether this would solve the problem, but that it deserves to be looked at. I agree. There are already NGOs working with Ugandan farmers via mobile phones, and we know that phones make markets more efficient, so I hope someone gets going on this soon. As for the ddebe boys, I expect they too will find a way to make a living. Maybe by sending SMS spam?
Smell this
Will perfume smell more delicious if the labdanum in it has been scraped off the beards of Cretan goats?
Ah, how I love to meander the byways of economic biology. Who knew that Cretan rock roses (Cistus creticus) produce a resin called labdanum? That labdanum, among many other uses, is a base note in perfume not unlike the fabled ambergris? Or that the best quality labdanum is gathered adventitiously, as it were, by goats grazing on Cretan herbage (rather like that civet-cat coffee)?
I didn’t either. But now you can too, thanks to the Human Flower Project.
Energy special
Hot on the heels of our concerns about carbon sequestration, biofuels, biochar, EGS and all that malarkey, The Economist has a special issue this week on Alternative Energy. ((Not sure how much of it is available to non-subscribers; if that link doesn’t work, please let me know.)) And what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Let a thousand flowers bloom.
UG99: The Phantom Menace?
Very good news from the United States Department of Agriculture. Breeders are about to release the first wheat lines that incorporate several genes for resistance to UG99, the new race of rust fungus that threatens wheat worldwide. One line will be available to growers on the east coast of the US. All will be available to breeders worldwide to develop new varieties adapted to local conditions.
Part of the effort leading to the new wheats has been a screening of more than 5000 accessions from several genebanks. One outcome of this massive evaluation exercise has been the discovery that UG99 had overcome many more resistance genes than original estimates. That’s why it has been important to pyramid several resistance genes into the new varieties. Just where those resistance genes came from I don’t know. But the USDA does say that the breeders “also will develop new sources of genetic resistance to rusts from three wild relatives of wheat”.
Good luck to them. Certainly the wheat farmers of Iran, ((I cannot resist a quick aside. At the FAO high-level meeting a couple of weeks ago one of the Iranian delegates dropped by my stall. I struck up a conversation.
Was he worried about UG99?
No, our scientists can control it.
Really? Where can I find out more?
They have communicated with the Authorities.
Really? Where can I find out more?
And so it went, with neither of us making much progress, and I was reminded mostly of the golden age of Stalinist genetics, an oxymoron if ever there was one.)) Pakistan, Afghanistan and northern India — the current front in the fight against UG99 — need all the help they can get. But a tiny part of me really rather hopes that the new varieties are not in fact a success.
The world badly needs another demonstration of the power of pests and diseases to destroy food supplies and the importance of agricultural biodiversity to protect us from them. Southern corn blight is the poster child for the value of diversity.
That outbreak more or less created the modern move to conserve crop diversity in genebanks, a move that has lost its impetus as the world forgets that food security requires the ready availability of lots and lots of agricultural biodiversity.
So while I am truly glad that breeders are making progress against UG99, I’d also like to see UG99 make real inroads into the developed world’s wheat crops, just as a reminder, lest they forget. ((I stole the Sith from here. If it is copyrighted, I apologise. Contact me, and I’ll remove it.))