Author: Luigi Guarino

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Down memory lane

I suppose if you blog long enough eventually you’ll end up re-visiting old stories. That happened quite a lot today.

First, there was a post I wrote a few months back about how mesquite — a useful source of food and other products in some places — is proving a nuisance in northern Kenya. Well, according to a story out today in the East African Standard, the government has been taken to court over the introduction of the plant, but is shifting the blame to FAO.

Then, you may recall a couple of posts about Brazil nuts and more generally nuts in Brazil. Today I ran across a paper ((Karen A. Kainer, Lucia H.O. Wadt and Christina L. Staudhammer. Explaining variation in Brazil nut fruit production. Forest Ecology and Management, 2007.)) which followed fruit production in 140 Brazil nut trees over 5 years. ((Clicking where it says map below this post will take you to where the Brazilian researchers work: Rio Branco, Acre)) What struck me was that there was significant variation in fruit production from year to year for individual trees, but that some trees are consistently high producers. I don’t know if there’s a Brazil nut improvement programme, but if there is it should definitely know about those! There are also management practices that are likely to increase production, such as cutting lianas and adding P.

Third, an editorial and article in Nature about the use of systems biology ((“The study of the interactions between proteins, genes, metabolites and components of cells or organisms”)) to evaluate traditional Chinese medicines reminded me that I’d written on that subject too. What is fascinating about Chinese traditional medicine is that it is based on diversity: it doesn’t deal in single chemicals taken singly, but rather in often incredibly complex combinations of a myriad plant and other products. A particular species will often play quite different roles in different formulae aimed at different symptoms.

Finally, I mentioned about a month back a piece of work ((Eric Giraud et al. Legume Symbioses: Absence of Nod Genes in Photosynthetic Bradyrhizobia. Science, 2007)) on an often overlooked but very important subset of agricultural biodiversity — microsymbionts. A longish article yesterday in EurekaAlert on the same work (I don’t know why the delay) made me realize I had been excessively cursory at the time of my original post. The researchers have identified a totally new genetic mechanism controlling the way nodulation happens, which opens up the possibility of interesting agricultural applications.

One of the things this little flurry of retrospection has done is alert me to the fact that some of the links in older posts may now be broken, for example because after a certain period of time the piece gets put into an archive behind a paywall. Not sure what we can do about that, though.

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A policy for pastoralism in Africa?

The African Union apparently launched a Pan-African Pastoral Policy Initiative at a conference at Isiolo in northern Kenya last week. There’s a little bit about the event on the website of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Pastoralist Communication Initiative (one of the organizers), but not much. An article summarizing some of the results was released a few days ago by the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks and got picked up by various agencies. But that’s all I’ve been able to find. Which is a pity, because listen to what the IRIN article says:

The key issues that emerged from the discussions included: governance; land; education; markets and financial services; conflicts; and poverty risk and vulnerability. Another point was the ‘biological dimension’ – feed resources and animal genetic resources.

There’s nothing about biodiversity in the African Union pamphlet introducing the policy initiative, but it sounds as though that may have been rectified during the meeting itself.

The IRIN article is very good, full of pithy quotes and interesting information, like this:

A concept note prepared by the AU and OCHA-PCI on the continental policy framework quotes UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2005 figures, which indicate that the continent has 235 million cattle, 472 million goats, 21 million pigs and 1.3 billion poultry, all valued at US$65 billion.

I did look for this concept note but sadly couldn’t find it online.