Author: Luigi Guarino

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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.”

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Measuring the elements of sorghum

There’s a great photo on the cover of Plant Physiology this month.

A small cross section of the breadth of diversity found in sorghum panicles from more than 45,000 accessions maintained by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System at Griffin, GA. Cover image credit: Nadia Shakoor, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, Missouri.
“A small cross section of the breadth of diversity found in sorghum panicles from more than 45,000 accessions maintained by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System at Griffin, GA.” Cover image credit: Nadia Shakoor, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, Missouri.

The paper in question looks at the “ionome” of sorghum seeds. That’s a new one on me too. It’s the genes responsible for the accumulation of different elements in whatever tissue. The authors measured the levels of a whole suite of elements in the seeds of a carefully chosen set of very diverse, and equally carefully genotyped, sorghum accessions representing all races. By comparing phenotype with genoptype, they identified gene variants associated with high levels of zinc, manganese, nickel, calcium, and cadmium. Now breeders interested in biofortification know what to include in their crossing programs.

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Nibbles: BananaGuard, Wheat has a blast, Grow your own antibiotic, Bhutanese cypress, Natural history collections, Genebanks big & small, Better grasslands, Local foodways