- ‘Do Not Privatize the Giant’s Shoulders’: Rethinking Patents in Plant Breeding. “Toll roads, not road blocks.”
- Implementation and cost analysis of a regional farm animal cryobank: an Italian case study. 2497 semen doses from 46 donor animals from 5 breeds cost €1550 annually, 83% for liquid nitrogen.
- Opportunities for Underutilised Crops in Southern Africa’s Post–2015 Development Agenda. Good for marginal land, good for nutritional diversity. But still not properly valued.
- Agricultural Management and Climatic Change Are the Major Drivers of Biodiversity Change in the UK. The first negatively, the second with mixed results. What about CWR specifically?
- Domestication Syndrome Is Investigated by Proteomic Analysis between Cultivated Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) and Its Wild Relatives. The leaf and root proteins of two cassava cultivars were different from those of one wild accession. More work needed, methinks.
- Interhousehold variability and its effects on seed circulation networks: a case study from northern Cameroon. Wealthy households have access to more diverse sorghum seed sources.
Tracking SDG 2, unofficially and preliminarly
The unofficial Preliminary Sustainable Development Goal Index and Dashboard are (is?) out, courtesy of SDSN, and open for comment. Here’s the list of indicators they used (click to embiggen).
Focus on the indicators relating to SDG 2, which is “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.” That would be the following:
- Prevalence of undernourishment (% of population)
- Cereal yield (kg/ha)
Uhm. What happened to the double burden of malnutrition? And both rice and pearl millet are cereals: do we really want to use the yield of such a nutritionally narrow but agronomically heterogenous crop category to track agricultural development globally? Also, not much there relating specifically to Target 2.5:
2.5 by 2020 maintain genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants, farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at national, regional and international levels, and ensure access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge as internationally agreed.
Because we do now have a good indicator, and indeed a decent baseline, for some aspects of that.
Nibbles: Chinese genebanks, Rough times at Roughwood, EU seed laws, Cacao & coffee migrations, CIMMYT pix
- China’s largest genebank just got a little bit larger. And some context.
- Small Pennsylvania genebank may get a lot smaller.
- Denmark shows the way on seed saving in Europe.
- Chocolate really got around.
- Coffee didn’t do too badly either. But home is where the heart is.
- More pix of wheat wild relatives than you can shake a stick at.
Good question
Workshop7: Natural Resources & Climate Change #TFFsummit2016 #uprootingassumptions pic.twitter.com/BmMHUpMq55
— Thought For Food (@thoughtforfood_) April 1, 2016
That’s Hannes Dempewolf doing his bit to uproot assumptions about crop diversity and genebanks at the Thought for Food Summit in Zurich. We’ll let you know if the assembled youth bought it.
Global Food Policy Report the usual downer
IFPRI’s 2016 Global Food Policy Report: How We Feed the World is Unsustainable is out and it makes for sobering reading. The press release doesn’t pull any punches either.
Land area the size of Nicaragua is lost due to drought and desertification every year, putting 200 million small-scale farmers in Africa south of the Sahara at high risk of climate change
The Western diet is unsustainable—feeding just one Westerner for one year emits as much greenhouse gas as seven round trip drives from New York to Los Angeles
Thankfully, some solutions are also suggested:
The development of climate-ready crops, which can lead to more efficient water use and improve yields, are key to feeding a growing population and adapting and mitigating against climate change.
Though you’ll look in vain for a mention of genebanks as underpinning efforts to roll out what I believe should properly be called climate-smart crops. “Climate-ready” was supposed to have been quietly deep-sized some time back, I’m reliably informed, as being too reminiscent of the draeded “Roundup-ready.”