Author: Luigi Guarino

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Organic agriculture

FAO has a paper out on organic agriculture, as part of the International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security, going on in Rome as I type. Here’s a quote:

The strongest feature of organic agriculture is its reliance on fossil-fuel independent and locally-available production assets; working with natural processes increases cost-effectiveness and resilience of agro-ecosystems to climatic stress. By managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental services to intensify production in a sustainable way.

Those are some of the strengths, and very significant they are too. An often-quoted weakness of organic agriculture, however, is that yields are often lower than what you’d expect from “conventional” agriculture. But why? Well, according to a recent study using wheat as a model, part of the reason is that the varieties used are poorly adapted to the particular conditions of organic agriculture: “increasing yield in organic systems through breeding will require direct selection within organic systems rather than indirect selection in conventional systems… With crop cultivars bred in and adapted to the unique conditions inherent in organic systems, organic agriculture will be better able to realize its full potential as a high-yielding alternative to conventional agriculture.”

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Drought resistance

A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.

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African medicinal plants

Two stories appeared today on medicinal plants in South Africa. AllAfrica has an article on the launch of the Medicinal Plant Incubator Project (MPIP) at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in Roodeplaat, although actually I found the keynote address delivered at the opening ceremony much more interesting. What will MPIP do? According to another article:

Gauteng’s traditional healers are to be taught new methods to cultivate plants and harvest them from the wild, in an attempt to ensure that the local medicine chest remains full for future generations.

Meanwhile, EurekAlert describes how “a team of researchers has now examined the effectiveness of 16 plants growing in the country’s Kwa-Zulu Natal region and concluded that eight plant extracts may hold value for treating high blood pressure (hypertension).”

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Traditional Knowledge Newsletter

The first issue of Pachamama, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s newsletter on traditional knowledge issues, is out. I found the article on sacred sites particularly interesting. Though agricultural biodiversity is unfortunately not mentioned explicitly, the author, Erjen Khamaganova, does say that:

Preservation of sacred sites is a key way to restore traditions of a healthy way of life, healthy diet and healthy habits in forms that are unique and suitable for each region and each indigenous nation.