A new measure of the sustainability of food production is out, thanks to The Economist Intelligence Unit 1 and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition, and making a splash, at least with the countries that come out with a high score. It considers agricultural sustainability, food loss and waste and nutritional challenges at a country level. Among the more than 60 indicators which go into making up the index you’ll find “agricultural diversification” (the share of total agricultural production represented by the top 3 crops) and something called “environmental biodiversity.” This last turns out to be the “Proportion of local breeds classified as being at risk of extinction” which of course is SDG Indicator 2.5.2, as we saw yesterday. That seems to be a little light on agricultural biodiversity (quite apart from the fact that the particular indicator has a lot of missing values). Have the compilers not heard of the Agrobiodiversity Index? Or of the other indicators under SDG Target 2.5?
Where does the SDG indicator data come from?
Just a quick reminder that the new Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS) is now live on the FAO website, as recently predicted. This is the source for SDG indicators 2.5.1 and 2.5.2.
I’ve actually just come back from a meeting at FAO organized by the plant equivalent of DAD-IS, the World Information and Early Warning System (WIEWS) on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which funnels data into the plant part of indicator 2.5.1. More on that later.
Cool coconut diversity posters
And totally free. Thanks, Roland.
Nibbles: Orphan edition
- The Economist jumps on the genomics-for-orphan-crops bandwagon.
- But is phenomics more important?
- And seed systems, don’t forget seed systems…
- Some of those orphan crops may get an International Day, if India has anything to do with it.
- Immortelle is as orphan as they come, but maybe not in Croatia any more.
- Amaranthus never really went away, not in Mexico.
- Persimmon, meanwhile, is being adopted by the snack industry in the US. But the Japanese are way ahead.
- Some think yerba mate is not orphan enough.
- Is yam an orphan. It depends on what your definition of is is.
- Avocado is the opposite of orphaned in Mexico. It is spoiled rotten.
- Many orphan crops are women’s crops. Case in point: enset.
- Orphan is a relative term, and reversible.
- Exhibit B: sweet potato.
- People often take their orphan crops with them. Even in antiquity.
- Coconut is fast becoming an orphan in Tanzania.
- With 32 cultivars available to grow in Louisiana alone, nobody can say lettuce is an orphan.
- Mexico and Brazil collaborate on crop diversity conservation. Including orphan crops?
- One thing that is probably not a huge priority for orphan crops is their wild relatives. Just saying.
- Anyway, we’re going to need all the orphan crops we can get if James Cameron’s titanic vegetarian utopia is to come true.
Brainfood: Setaria diversity, Planteome, Cowpea diversity, Fertile Crescent CWR, Beer flavour, Marula diversity, Wild dates
- Genetic Structure of Foxtail Millet Landraces. China is the centre of diversity, and diversity structured geographically there.
- The Planteome database: an integrated resource for reference ontologies, plant genomics and phenomics. A sort of ontology of ontologies.
- Genetic diversity and structure of Iberian Peninsula cowpeas compared to world-wide cowpea accessions using high density SNP markers. Iberian material all falls into 1 (S Europe-N Africa) of 4 worldwide groups.
- Setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent. 220 priority species.
- Effects of Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Variety and Growing Environment on Beer Flavor. It’s not just the hops.
- Molecular Characterization of Sclerocarya birrea ICRAF Field Genebank Collections. Even the duplicates identified could be good for something.
- The Domestication Syndrome in Phoenix dactylifera Seeds: Toward the Identification of Wild Date Palm Populations. Fancy maths shows there may be actual wild date palms in Oman.