Author: Luigi Guarino

Posted on

Africa gets behind genebanks

The African Union Commission organized a Seed Summit under the theme “Resilient Seed Systems for a Food Secure Africa”, hosted by the Kingdom of Eswatini from 5-7 October 2026.

The results are summarized in the Ezulwini Outcome Document, which includes the following:

Given the precarious state of many national genebanks, it’s really good to see the call to “strengthen and sustainably finance…” them “…in Member States.” Though I would have preferred to see that phrased as “…by Member States.”

The document is a ministerial outcome that I believe still has to go through AU policy organs for validation and endorsement, so nothing here is binding yet. It sets no funding figures, timelines or locations for the continental genebank, and it uses verbs like “support” and “request” rather than “establish.” Nevertheless, the recognition of the importance of genebanks is very welcome. We will keep a beady eye on how this develops.

Posted on

Rounding off the 20th anniversary celebrations

I’ve been celebrating 20 years of the blog with deep dives into its past, focusing on my favourite recurring themes. I did one post a day for a week, but I could have gone on for a month, I reckon. By way of summary, here are the links:

Let me know in the comments or on social media if you have your own favourite subject you’d like explored in the archives, and I’ll see what I can do. Or you can do it yourself and send me the results and I’ll share them on the blog.

BTW, since we’re reminiscing, this is what Jeremy had to say about the blog on its 15th birthday.

Posted on

Eucalyptus: it’s complicated

Are eucalyptus plantations good or bad?

I’ve been wondering about this one for a while. Back in 2010, I wrote about my mother-in-law’s eucalypts near Limuru in Kenya. She had been tending and coppicing them for years, and they were her main source of firewood. When part of the plantation was felled by government decree, she considered planting indigenous trees, but eucalypts were, as I put it then, “too fast-growing to give up altogether.”

Two new studies make the same point rather more systematically. In Uganda, eucalyptus plantations appear to have some positive effects on livelihood, including higher cattle holdings than among households near pine plantations, without producing the sweeping negative effects sometimes attributed to them. In Brazil, mixed eucalyptus–native plantations (as a transitional stage in restoration) produced substantially more biomass than native-only plantings, while allowing native trees to regenerate. The timber income also covered a significant proportion of restoration costs.

So the value of eucalyptus depends on what it’s doing there, what it replaced, what else is growing with it, and what people are getting from it. A plantation replacing native forest is one thing. Eucalyptus providing firewood to my mother-in-law, generating income from degraded land, or helping pay for ecological restoration is another.

The tree is the same. The story isn’t.

Posted on

Nibbles: Bacon kitchen garden, Bison diversity, African herbaria, Mycorrhiza, China wild rice genebank, African seed laws

  1. Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England. And the cookmaid gets equal billing.
  2. North America’s bison survived near-extinction, but how much of its genetic diversity is left? Past and present DNA is helping reconstruct what was lost, with implications for how what remains is conserved and managed.
  3. China’s wild rice collection in Hainan now holds more than 15,000 samples. A genetic treasure trove, but its value ultimately depends on what breeders can make of it. Much like what’s left of bison diversity.
  4. Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that support plant life and store carbon. A new global map begins to show their extent, and just how much of this biodiversity remains overlooked.
  5. Africa’s herbaria hold centuries of botanical history, much of it still effectively invisible. Specimens can reveal shifting plant distributions and overlooked species. First, though, someone has to do the painstaking work of getting the data online.
  6. Africa has done painstaking work on seed laws, but getting good seed to farmers remains hard in practice. The gap between policy and delivery is stark, and commercial companies need to work alongside farmer-managed seed systems, not pretend they don’t exist.
Posted on

Ducks walking in a row

The League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development has taken the FAO global livestock distribution maps and added information on the pastoralist groups that keep each species. That goes with other fascinating interactive online maps they have on threats, migration routes, and more.

Which gives me the opportunity to point out that there is such a thing as duck pastoralism, for example in Tamil Nadu:

Ducks can walk a maximum of a kilometre a day. For longer distances, the rearer hires a lorry. Ducks from Tamil Nadu migrate as far as Mangalore and Bellary in Karnataka, Cuddapah in Andhra Pradesh and Ernakumlam in Cochin, and as far as Goa, 850 km away on the west coast. Small-scale rearers may pool their flocks and hire a lorry. The duck rearers often migrate with their families . Only school going children stay back in their native home with grandparents or relatives.

Distribution of ducks (green area) and duck pastoralist groups (green dots).

I’d really like to see that one day.