- 26 million hectares of forest were lost in 2020.
- Genetic groups in grizzly bears line up with Indigenous languages in British Columbia. How about the trees, though?
- But why weren’t grizzly bears domesticated? Because they’re not friendly, feedable, fecund and family-friendly.
- Drones and wheat breeding.
- Crowdsourcing okra evaluation. No drones involved.
- Health-conscious urban Indians eat millet for health reasons. Goes great with okra.
- The Common Table: sharing stories about reforming the food system. Like a couple of the above.
How to really make seed systems sustainable
Attentive readers may remember a reference here to Crops to End Hunger’s white paper on economically sustainable seed systems. This provides…
…recommendations for how One CGIAR may want to adjust its approaches and collaboration with National Breeding Programs and private sector entities to (i) be more successful in developing and deploying newly developed varieties, and (ii) support the evolution towards a more effective, sustainable local seed sector, with appropriate public and regulatory capacities and a vibrant entrepreneurial sector.
There’s since been a nice interview with one of the authors. But the reason for bringing it up now is that Oxfam Novib has published a reaction.
While recognizing some important positives (e.g., the aim to diversify the range of public-bred crop varieties available to smallholder farmers), Oxfam Novib also expresses some serious concerns. These are perhaps best encapsulated in the following observation:
The paper’s recommendation that the One CG develop a centralized system for germplasm licensing and revenue management between the CG centers and national breeding programs implies that seed revenues will be derived from smallholder farmers – but farmers and farmer groups will be excluded from involvement in creating new varieties and generating income from them.
It will be interesting to see One CGIAR’s response.
Small (farms) continue to be beautiful
Susan MacMillan of ILRI contributed a long comment to my short post “Smallholders still produce a lot of food” from a few days back. As she clarifies some of the definitions, adds a reference or two, and points out that livestock are usually neglected in this discussion, I think it’s worth raising its profile here. Do read the whole thing.
So, my take is that ‘it’s complicated’. But as you say, whatever the definitions of terms, people farming relatively small plots of land still produce a whole lot of food for a whole lot of people besides themselves—and they need our support more than ever to continue to do so under ever-more challenging conditions.
Brainfood: Predicting society, Andean Neolithic, Ancient watermelon, Iberian silos, Scythian lifeways, Rabbit domestication, British cockerels, Azeri buffaloes, E African caprines, Persian fruit miniatures
- Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia. Large, complex human societies arise where there is a long history of agriculture and war; and not, interestingly, where potential productivity is highest.
- Diet, Mobility, Technology, and Lithics: Neolithization on the Andean Altiplano, 7.0–3.5 ka. It seems the rise of large, complex societies arose in the Andes is associated with the change in projectile technology from atlatl to archery.
- Three-dimensional X-ray-computed tomography of 3300- to 6000-year-old Citrullus seeds from Libya and Egypt compared to extant seeds throws doubts on species assignments. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, people were snacking on watermelon seeds.
- From the earliest farmers to the first urban centres: a socio-economic analysis of underground storage practices in north-eastern Iberia. You can track socioeconomic changes in ancient Iberian cultures (c. 5600–50 BC) via the size and morphology of their grain silos. No word on projectile technologies nor watermelons though.
- Re-evaluating Scythian lifeways: Isotopic analysis of diet and mobility in Iron Age Ukraine. Meanwhile, back on those steppes, 700-200 BC, some people were relatively settled, with their agro-pastoralism and millet agriculture, while others moved. So much for warlike nomads. Must have had watermelons by then, surely.
- Why were New World rabbits not domesticated? Because they’re solitary, dispersed and there’s too many different types. Most North American evidence of management comes from Teotihuacan, ~AD 1–550.
- Estimating the age of domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus L. 1758) cockerels through spur development. In Britain, Iron Age and Roman cockerels died way too old to have been kept for meat, and were thus probably also used for rituals and cockfighting. No word on the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.
- The earliest water buffalo in the Caucasus: shifting animals and people in the medieval Islamic world. The water buffalo came to Azerbaijan with Islam in the 7-9th centuries.
- Collagen fingerprinting traces the introduction of caprines to island Eastern Africa. Goats from the 7th century CE, sheep a couple hundred years later. No word on water buffaloes.
- An illustrated review on manifestation of pome fruit germplasm in the historic miniatures of ancient Persia. 14-18th century Persian artists had a thing for pears, quinces and apples, and drew them very accurately.
Nibbles: Quinoa info, Hybrid rye, New tobacco, GMOs
- If you’re into quinoa, you’re probably going to need this directory.
- Hybrid rye is becoming a useful participant in maize-soybean rotations in the Corn Belt where giant ragweed is a problem.
- New insect-trapping wild tobacco species described from Australia.
- Biotechnologist and social scientist in conversation about genetic modification and gene editing.