Lawrence Haddad, of the Institute for Development Studies in the UK, has an interesting post up on Trying to work across the health-development divide. I’ve no intention of trying to summarise here, just pointing it out as sharing insights into some of the real difficulties of working on, say, agricultural biodiversity and diet. Likewise, Science magazine has a special on Disease Prevention that includes non-communicable diseases associated with nutrition.
Malawi changes tack
Malawi has long been the posterchild for the subsidize-maize-fertiliser-and-all-will-be-well school of agricultural development. The success of the government’s programme was touted wherever aid experts gather.
“For four years in a row, a starving country is no longer a starving country,” said Pedro Sanchez, an advisor to the Malawian government who directs the Tropical Agriculture and the Rural Environment Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University, extravagantly praised cheap fertiliser in his book, The New Harvest. And he singled out Malawi’s miracle in a 2010 interview with New Scientist magazine.
African soils are in a poor state because of the low use of fertiliser. Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s president, is showing the lead here. He is giving subsidies to farmers to buy fertiliser.
But what’s this? Malawi has now decided to give away goats and to promote alternative crops, and is passing a nutrition act that bans the sale of “non-fortified basic foodstuffs”. The country is acting as if there’s more to food security than bumper maize harvests. And they admit it!
Senior civil servants claim the moves mark a departure from farming policies that simply aimed to fill people up with staple maize in lean times. Food shortages affect 1.6 million people every year, and an estimated 47% of children have stunted growth because of undernutrition, making them more vulnerable to illness and learning difficulties.
This has to have been on the books longer than the recent grain shortages plaguing the south of Malawi, and the country’s troubles are far from over. But if the shift in direction does make the country both better nourished and less susceptible to shocks, perhaps we’ll start hearing less about simplistic solutions to wicked problems.
Nibbles: Yams, Wild relatives, Plant breeding, Bamboo, Funding, Leaves, Red rice, Rice breeder, Governance and poverty
- Yams heading for trouble. What to do?
- Learn something from wild relatives, like they’re doing with tomatoes?
- Go for a totally new plant breeding paradigm?
- I know, let’s all go out and celebrate World Bamboo Day!
- Switzerland gives Laos US$6.3m in support of government’s agrobiodiversity initiative.
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation gives Growing Power US$5m in support of Growing Power’s urban agriculture efforts.
- National Geographic gives leaves a good going-over without mentioning agriculture.
- Farmers in Kerala give Navara red rice as a reason for good health and prosperity.
- World gives Monty Jones, rice breeder, high status.
- Paul Collier fan gives African governance the blame for low agricultural productivity.
Support a plant breeder
One of the strangest crowdsourcing appeals I’ve ever seen landed in my in-tray this morning. Sarvari Research Trust, onlie begetters of Sarpo potatoes, are looking for £5000 in order to bring a new variety to market. And the reason they need the money is that the variety has to be certified and approved by the UK government before it is allowed on sale. That’s how most agricultural biodiversity is managed in the European Union; if a variety isn’t registered, which costs money, it can’t be marketed. To protect us, obviously.
The Sarvari Trust says:
We can’t get grant funding for this kind of work because is thought to be near market research and therefore a private matter. Breeders of GM resistant potatoes do get grant support!
Frankly, I think that’s over-egging the pudding a little. The cost of testing and registering a variety is always going to be a “near-market” issue, and I doubt breeders of GM potatoes get support for that aspect of their work. The real scandal is that the fixed costs of variety registration are a huge burden for a small breeder, and trivial for a large one. And farmers and gardeners who would like access to a greater range of agricultural biodiversity are denied choice as a result.
Will Ecuador benefit from wild tomato genes?
A tweet alerted me to a story about the value of genes in crop wild relatives.
The source headline is “Galapagos tomato provides key to making cultivated tomatoes resistant to whitefly,” and though it reads like a press release ((As, indeed, I would expect it to, given that the source is one of these echoing link farms.)) I have so far been unable to run down the original. I did, however, locate the event of note.
By now, Syarifin Firdaus should have successfully defended his graduate thesis on Whitefly Resistance In Tomato and Hot Pepper, which was due to take place today and which I imagine created all the interest.
My interest stemmed from the Twitterer’s question: “Will Ecuador benefit?”
The blurb for Firdaus’ talk makes it clear that after sampling almost 100 genebank accessions, wild Solanum galapagense had the strongest resistance and this seemed to be down to a single gene on chromosome 2. But it also pointed out that resistance was found in two other wild Solanum species, and in several Capsicums.
With these results, introduction of the resistance into modern tomato varieties is feasible and within a few years the first commercial, resistant tomato cultivars are expected on the market.
And that is a good thing not so much because whitefly damage the crop, but because they transmit virus diseases that are really harmful.
The release, which lists all the private sector companies involved in the research, strongly suggests that it will be genes from S. galapagense that will be bred into commercial varieties “within two years”. It also says that “resistance was also found in China, Indonesia and Thailand,” presumably in local tomato varieties rather than wild relatives.
Will Ecuador benefit? I seriously doubt it. Other wild relatives from Ecuador (and elsewhere) have already donated genes worth millions of dollars to the tomato industry, and no precedent has been set.
Should Ecuador benefit? Hard to see why. It isn’t as if S. galapagense (which until relatively recently was treated as a form of S. cheesmaniae, a well-established source of good tomato genes) has been maintained by farmers since time immemorial.
Best yet, tomato isn’t even listed on Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Solanum section tuberosa, sure; Solanum melongena, you bet. But Solanum lycopersicum and its wild relatives, outta luck.
Of course, the genetic resource in question might just be covered by the Convention on Biological Diversity, which offers Ecuador and its supporters a glimmer of hope, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
What I really want to know is why S. galapagense is resistant? What are the insect pests on the Galapagos that exerted such strong selection pressure? Perhaps @WayOfThePanda can find out.