- More on the US push for opportunity crops.
- Oh look there’s a whole compendium on African opportunity crops from FAO.
- Many of them are roots and tubers.
- For the Hopi, maize is an opportunity crop.
- For the Adivasis, it’s rice.
- And more along the same lines from Odisha.
- Llamas were an opportunity for lots of people down the ages.
- …and still are, for some.
- Portugal eschews llamas for an ancient cattle breed.
- I bet Mexico’s genebank offers some amazing opportunities.
- And New Zealand’s too.
- Let’s not forget bats. Yes, bats.
- Jeremy’s latest newsletter tackles turmeric, pepper and sweet potatoes, among other things.
- And the best way to frame all of the above is that the World Economic Forum wants governments to ban people from growing their own food because that causes climate change.
What IS wrong with biofortification?
Well, it all started with a paper with more or less that title from Maarten van Ginkel & Jeremy Cherfas last year. Their answer was that biofortification doesn’t work, costs yield and risks genetic uniformity. Ouch. So what to do? Diversify diets, of course.
That was followed by a rebuttal from Prasanna Boddupalli, Jill Cairns and Natalia Palacios-Rojas of CIMMYT. Unfortunately, their letter is not open access, but if you want to know what van Ginkel and Cherfas think of their arguments, they’ve just published a counter:
In conclusion, the charges raised by Boddupalli et al. are exactly those we would expect to be motivated by concerns about funding rather than by an interest in scientific research to benefit farmers and consumers. This emphasis on biofortification as even part of the solution to the continuing problem of hidden hunger inhibits the alternative we presented; a holistic approach based on diversified, nutritious, nutrient dense, sustainable, affordable diets that can address hidden hunger effectively to deliver better health.
This will run and run.
Brainfood: Wild melon dispersal, Fertile Crescent domestications, Angiosperm threats, Wild rice alliance, Wild potato leaves, Brassica oleracea pangenome, Wild Vigna nutrients
- Frugivory by carnivores: Black-backed jackals are key dispersers of seeds of the scented !nara melon in the Namib Desert. Jackals pee on wild melon relatives and disperse their seeds, not necessarily in that order.
- Out of the Shadows: Reestablishing the Eastern Fertile Crescent as a Center of Agricultural Origins: Part 1. Go East, young archaeobotanists!
- Extinction risk predictions for the world’s flowering plants to support their conservation. Fancy maths says 45% of angiosperms are potentially threatened. Same for crop wild relatives in the Eastern Fertile Crescent? Black-backed jackals unavailable for comment.
- Global Wild Rice Germplasm Resources Conservation Alliance: WORLD WILD-RICE WIRING. Scientists get together to conserve global wild rice germplasm resources, understand the ecology of wild rice environments, identify and address threats, define effective ways to use wild species in rice improvement, and provide data for decision-making. Not a minute too soon, given the above.
- Morphometric analysis of wild potato leaves. Who needs genotyping anyway.
- Large-scale gene expression alterations introduced by structural variation drive morphotype diversification in Brassica oleracea. Brassica scientists need genotyping, apparently, that’s who.
- Exploring the nutritional potentials of wild Vigna legume species for neo-domestication prospects. Not much potential if they go extinct though. Quick, photograph their leaves!
Faith Fyles, and more
A Facebook post from the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum on Faith Fyles, botanist and botanical artist, and the first woman assistant botanist in the federal Department of Agriculture (1911), leads to a treasure trove of interesting stuff.
Brainfood: US edition
- Vulnerability of U.S. new and industrial crop genetic resources. More germplasm (especially wild relatives) and breeders are needed in the US of castor bean, gumweed, guar, guayule, kenaf, roselle, safflower, sesame, sunn hemp, rubber dandelion and Vernonia.
- Safeguarding Plant Genetic Resources in the U.S. But the conservation system itself has its challenges, due to climate change.
- Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture. But climate change is not the only thing that agriculture (and possibly the conservation system too) needs to adapt to.
- Efforts to cryopreserve shrimp (Penaeid) genetic resources and the potential for a shrimp germplasm bank in the United States. Sure, why not, let them eat shrimp.
- Mother Tubers of Wild Potato Solanum jamesii can Make Shoots Five Times. Are enough populations of this thing in genebanks, I wonder? No, not compared to shrimps.
- ‘Hybrid’ US sheep breeder used endangered genetic material, faces jail. Yes, I know this is not peer-reviewed, but would you have left it out of this American round-up?