Luigi Guarino

May 14, 2019May 14, 2019

It’s Meyer time!

There’s nothing on the website yet, but it looks like Dr Tom Payne, genebank manager at CIMMYT, has been awarded the Frank N. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources for 2019. This is richly deserved. Congratulations to Tom, who joins a very illustrious club.

Tom will no doubt celebrate in the newly refurbished lobby of the genebank.

This morning at @CIMMYT's HQ, we inaugurated the new lobby of the Wellhausen-Anderson Plant Genetic Resources Center.
The multi-disciplinary team that led this revamp has truly honored the maize and wheat diversity safeguarded in the genebank. pic.twitter.com/bWN33zrRRR

— MartinKropff (@KropffMartin) April 26, 2019

May 13, 2019May 13, 2019

Brainfood: More than yield, Cotton breeding, Chickpea genome, Mutations & domestication, Holy Grail, Restoration, Watermelon diversity, Language diversity, Ocimum diversity, Clean cassava, Neolithic feasting, Amazonian agriculture, Sharecropping

The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency. It’s the cheap calories, stupid.
Genetic Evaluation of Exotic Chromatins from Two Obsolete Interspecific Introgression Lines of Upland Cotton for Fiber Quality Improvement. Yield from one species, fibre quality from the other.
Resequencing of 429 chickpea accessions from 45 countries provides insights into genome diversity, domestication and agronomic traits. Including drought tolerance.
Genome of ‘Charleston Gray’, the principal American watermelon cultivar, and genetic characterization of 1,365 accessions in the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System watermelon collection. Four genetic groups reflecting geography.
Genome-wide nucleotide patterns and potential mechanisms of genome divergence following domestication in maize and soybean. The best candidates for domestication are plants that are willing to mutate a bit, but not too much.
Crop Biodiversity: An Unfinished Magnum Opus of Nature. “Linking genotype and phenotype remains the holy grail of crop biodiversity studies.”
Meeting global land restoration and protection targets: What would the world look like in 2050? Very nice. It would look very nice.
The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity. High year-round productivity leads to lots of languages. And lots of biodiversity, but that’s another story.
Product authenticity versus globalisation—The Tulsi case. The division of Indian Holy Basil into 3 types based on traditional knowledge is only partially supported by genetic and phytochemical studies.
A method for generating virus-free cassava plants to combat viral disease epidemics in Africa. Let the distribution commence.
Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. They must have been some feasts.
Persistent Early to Middle Holocene tropical foraging in southwestern Amazonia. On the cusp of agriculture 10,000 years ago in Bolivia. That’s about the same time as Göbekli Tepe, give or take a thousand years.
Moral Hazard: Experimental Evidence from Tenancy Contracts. Tenant farmers should keep a higher share to increase productivity and diversity, but of course the landlords won’t let them so what’s needed is revolution.

May 8, 2019May 21, 2019

Nibbles: Dog & bone, Giant maize, Edible Archive, Myanmar diversification, Colombian community seedbank, Sorghum grande, Coconut exhibit, Chinese ag history, African domestication, Japanese citrus, RivieraLigure DOP, Cactus candy, Hazelnut resistance, American crop rethinks, Public sector engagement

Nice synthesis of dog (and chicken) domestication.
Saving the Jala maize landrace in Mexico.
Saving lots of rice landraces in India by eating them.
Myanmar does not live by rice alone. And neither does India.
Saving a whole bunch of stuff in Colombia.
Saving a sorghum wild relative in Australia.
How coconuts can help museums decolonize.
Maybe agricultural development needs to decolonize too. Discuss.
Africa’s Fertile Crescent is the Niger River Basin. Nice, but we saw that coming first.
Citrus is big in Japan.
Olive oil is big in Liguria.
The visnaga cactus was big in the US Southwest once. As an ingredient in candy, of all things.
Breeding filberts in the US.
Tomato 2.0.
And a bunch of other crops American farmers and breeders are having to adapt to climate change.
And not just that, they have to deliver better nutrition too.
Eat what you want, sure. But think what that means for climate change.
Principles for GAIN engaging with the private sector (in all its diversity) on nutrition. Could be applied to engagement on climate change, I suppose, and crop diversity conservation for that matter. My question, though, is: runaway train, or Titanic?

May 7, 2019

How to succeed at development

And speaking of that particular Brainfood, looking back at it I noticed that three of the papers could perhaps be mashed up. They looked at the impacts of proximity to protected areas, proximity to oil palm plantations and agricultural intensification on different key development outcomes ¹. Bringing all the results together suggests that for communities to do really well they need to:

be near protected areas
be near oil palm plantations
have decent access to markets and tourists (i.e. roads)
intensify their agriculture from either a very low or a quite high initial level

I now want some GIS whizkid to pinpoint where all these conditions coincide for a veritable perfect storm of well-being.

May 7, 2019May 7, 2019

Stunting as a smoke alarm

Remember that paper on stunting that we included in Brainfood a couple of weeks ago? It was called What Does Stunting Really Mean? A Critical Review of the Evidence, and the answer to the question in the title was, to put it bluntly: not as much as many think.

Why is that important? Well, because “[s]tunting is commonly believed to cause serious problems, including delayed child development, reduced productivity and earnings in adulthood, higher incidence of chronic diseases including obesity or cardiovascular problems, difficult childbirth, and poor birth outcomes such as low birthweight.” But it turns out that this is not entirely true, and “this subtle misinterpretation could harm the global nutrition agenda.”

That’s from a blog post by one of the authors on the IFPRI website, which also includes a handy video explanation of the subtleties involved. Here’s the bottom line: stunting is not so much the fire as the smoke alarm.