Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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How to improve nutrition

Bob Ziegler, DG of IRRI, explains why the world needs biofortified staples:

Take the example of rice, the staple food for more than half of the world’s population – including more than half a billion of the world’s poorest in Asia. These people often eat rice and little else. While rice is an excellent food, it does not have all the vitamins and minerals a person needs – so many of these people don‘t get enough essential nutrients like iron, zinc, and vitamin A.

A diverse and nutritious diet is the best option, sadly however, this is often too expensive or simply unavailable.

Simple, eh?

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Nibbles: Climate predictions, Melon sequenced, Banana adoption, CRP networking, Supply chains, NUS value chains, Climate change good

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British pride in its opium processors

Paul Madden, the UK’s High Commissioner in Canberra, Australia, is just back from Tasmania full of enthusiasm for …

UK pharma giant GSK. ((The company formerly known as Glaxo Smith Kline.)) They process poppies grown by some 400 farms around the island, which go on to become the basis for many important global medicines. It is a very R&D oriented business, as new plant varieties are constantly being developed to produce increasingly sophisticated alkaloids.

If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ll know what comes next, and I hate to disappoint.

Why on earth is Tasmania encouraged to produce “half the world’s legitimate opiates,” while the same liberty and investment are not afforded the poor farmers of Afghanistan? Britain has interests there too, I believe. Less than a year ago the cumulative cost of those interests was estimated at GBP18 billion. How much would have been needed to create a properly constituted market that would adequately reward Afghan farmers for their resilience, agricultural know-how, and contributions to on-farm conservation? How much might such an effort have saved in not having to combat the people who are supporting Afghan farmers?

It isn’t just the drugs. Madden notes that

Nothing is wasted: the poppy seeds which are a by-product are sold into the catering industry. When you tuck into a lemon and poppy seed muffin anywhere in the world, the chances are the seeds came from GSK in Tasmania.

Funnily enough, that doesn’t impress me either. Were there no sour notes in the High Commissioner’s trip?

My only disappointment was to learn that these poppies are all white, rather than the red ones we associate with Poppy Day in the UK.

How very parochial, and biologically unbriefed.

The red poppies — Papaver rhoeas as opposed to P. somniferum — don’t produce opium or morphine, although they make plenty of thebaine. And believe it or not, thebaine is often the basis for those “increasingly sophisticated alkaloids,” and Tasmanian researchers are working hard to block synthesis at that point, so the poppies would be “useless for the illicit drug trade“.

One final point; they don’t have to be all white, unless you want them to be.

Petal colour diversity in Papaver somniferum.
Petal colour diversity in Papaver somniferum.
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Superwheat: not another comic hero

BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today this morning had visited the John Innes Centre to hear all about superwheats, promising yields of 15 t/ha as opposed to the current (UK) average of about 8t/ha. Intrepid reporter Anna Hill couldn’t supress a little chuckle as she gazed in awe at 5 foot (150 cm) tall plants towering over her, each ear enclosed in a little plastic bag.

The John Innes Centre is looking in wheats from thousands of years ago for traits to feed the 9 billion, traits that might have been left behind because they weren’t incorporated into the pool when modern wheat breeding began.

There’s a lot there to take issue with. The researcher ((John Alford? Anna Hill wasn’t too clear, and his name doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the Farming Today website.)) described landraces as having developed “almost naturally,” which rather downplays the role of farmers in both selecting and maintaining the characteristics of their landraces. It also gives the lie to the idea that these landraces are thousands of years old. I don’t know exactly when they were collected, but I’d be willing to bet is was less than 100 years ago, at most.

Then there’s the whole idea of going back to landraces in search of forgotten traits as if this was some Eureka-style breakthrough in breeder thinking. John Innes’ breeders are hardly the first to have thought of this. In fact CIMMYT went one better, and actually recreated modern wheat by re-hybridizing the parental species, broadening considerably the genetic base for breeders.

(Those breeders, by the way, have just published a summary of the yield gains in their elite spring wheat programme over the past 15 years (1995-2009). Average annual gains across 919 environments in 69 countries are of the order of 0.65%. Of course, that’s no reason to be complacent — the trend may be slowing — but still … ((I had wanted to quote the avertage yield in all those trials, but CIMMYT chooses to publish publicly-funded research behind a paywall. It’s a scandal. If you can get the figure, please share.)))

And finally, the bit that really made me squirm was when Anna Hill put Alford (if it was he) on the spot by asking what traits he was looking for, and whether he had found anything, and the poor researcher was left to utter pleasantries about transport systems, and leaf area, and robust plants and disease resistance and photosynthesis and “it’s very complicated”. It all seemed to reflect a press release in search of a story.

Anyway, listen for yourself.