Useful plants of tropical Africa databased

PROTA is an international, not-for-profit foundation. It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information through Webdatabases, Books, CD-Rom’s and Special Products.

I knew that, but hadn’t checked out progress on the centrepiece database in a while. Until today. I couldn’t get the “word wheel” thing to work, whatever that is, but the search function seems to work fine and the actual content is great. Now, why not link to GBIF?

Kenya short of beer

This one really raises more questions than it answers. An article in Kenya’s The Nation newspaper, reprinted by allAfrica.com, says that:

The Government Monday donated traditional crop seeds to farmers as it moved to ensure food security.

So the first question is: seeds of traditional crops or traditional seeds of traditional crops? Ok, probably the former. Then:

The seeds released Thursday were destined for western Kenya which is experiencing poor rains.

Well, western Kenya has experienced poor rains before, and I never heard of such government munificence before. Ah, but:

Production of these crops has declined due to unavailability of planting materials, little interest from seed companies due to low demand and low investment in research.

The crops which do well in dry areas have also been affected by limited knowledge among farmers, change of eating habits and limited knowledge on agro-processing to add value and improve marketability of the crops.

Well, very true, but all that’s been the case for ages. So, probably politics, I guess. Ruto is from the opposition party, and western Kenya is an opposition stronghold, although he’s not from there. No, wait, that’s too cynical, here’s the explanation for the urgency:

“We have been informed that Kenya Breweries Limited require 24,000 tonnes of white sorghum per year for brewing lager. Towards this, we will be distributing over 100 tonnes of white sorghum seeds in 62 districts,” Mr Ruto said.

Anyway, what varieties were used? It would be nice to think that maybe the Genebank of Kenya was involved in sourcing diverse, locally adapted material, but somehow I doubt it.

Nibbles: Bees, Training, Fertilizers, Darfur, Tourism, Vinegar, Gardens

Organic shmorganic

So is organic better or what? Not, according to the latest salvo in the debate. Last March a report from the Organic Trade Association in the US said that organic produce had on average a 25% nutritional advantage over the “normal” stuff. But now Prof. Joseph Rosen at Rutgers says in a report for the American Council on Science and Health that the previous study was flawed and the advantage disappears when you compare like with strictly like. That may well be, of course, but a recent paper shows that there are other benefits of going organic. The ecological footprint of organic Tuscan wine was found to be half that of a conventionally-produced tipple. No word on the relative health benefits.

Quality management in genebanks

You may remember a nibble a few weeks back about CIP’s ISO accreditation for its germplasm acquisition, management and distribution operations. The press release stated that:

This is the first time that a genebank has gained accreditation anywhere in the world.

I was a bit skeptical about this initially, as I knew that some European genebanks had also put in place a formal quality management system. But, on reading about the subject on the website of the Dutch genebank, it seems that what they have achieved is certification, which I have a feeling is quite different to accreditation. Maybe some expert out there will put me out of my misery.

Anyway, I was reminded of all this by a paper just out in Theriogenology which looks at managing the quality of the 127,479 samples in the US swine germplasm collection at Ft Collins.