The BBC’s Roots to Riches reaches genebanking for conservation, with the above title. Mainly about the Millennium Seed Bank, which is predictable, and perfectly fine, but we know there’s a lot more to it than that, of course.
Nibbles: Fossil biodiversity, Culture & health, Cicer drought experiment, Endangered fish, Wheat hydridization, Food aid, Ag trade double, Sustainable diets, Fermentation book
- The Global Fossil Record. Visualized. Not agricultural, but couldn’t resist it.
- Malnutrition? It’s the culture, stupid.
- Check out the world’s largest chickpea drought trial.
- Overfishing the Amazon.
- Ah, so that’s how wheat did it!
- Food aid can support sustainable livelihoods too.
- Soon, most crop production will go to feed China’s pigs. And you’ll be able to follow that on FAOStat’s interactive thingie on agricultural tradeflows.
- But it can’t possibly be good for sustainable diets, can it?
- New book on fermentation. Never enough of those.
Totally terere
The launching of FAO’s Traditional Crop of the Month with amaranth, just announced on Twitter, reminds me that I was going to post a couple of photos showing how much the crop is being used nowadays in Kenya. These show that terere leaves are used — along with other stuff — to fortify maize meal, which is used to make ugali, the main staple food around here for many people. I took the pix in a supermarket in Lavington, an upscale residential area, and they represent two different brands of unga. Just look under ingredients.
Brainfood: Azeri grapes, Biodiversity & ecoservices, Ivorian melons, Omani chickens, Insecticides & pollinators, Czech wild wheat, African yams, Livestock breeding, Natural selection, Bean proteins
- Biodiversity and breeding of grapes: a study in Azerbaijan. Long history, 2 main wild types, 600 cultivated varieties, 100 of them threatened.
- Linkages between biodiversity attributes and ecosystem services: A systematic review. Mainly, but not exclusively, positive. Always complicated.
- Genetic relationships among accessions of African indigenous melons (Cucumis melo L. ssp. agrestis) using AFLP markers. Vegetable and soup thickener types separate genetically.
- From India to Africa across Arabia: An mtDNA assessment of the origins and dispersal of chicken around the Indian Ocean Rim. Arabian chickens come from India, Somali chickens from SE Asia.
- A restatement of the natural science evidence base concerning neonicotinoid insecticides and insect pollinators.. Here’s the data. Make up your own mind.
- Aegilops conservation and collection evaluation in the Czech Republic. 1 species in situ, 21 ex situ.
- Next-generation sequencing based genotyping, cytometry and phenotyping for understanding diversity and evolution of guinea yams. Both wild and cultivated species form distinct groups, except for Dioscorea rotundata, which is a mishmash of stuff.
- Issues and concerns in smallholder livestock genetic improvement programs in Africa. Got to select for multiple uses under less-than-ideal conditions. Not easy.
- Exploring natural selection to guide breeding for agriculture. Survival in the wild is not the same as performance in a cultivated field, but understanding the basis of adaptation can still help in breeding.
- Evaluating Two-Dimensional Electrophoresis Profiles of the Protein Phaseolin as Markers of Genetic Differentiation and Seed Protein Quality in Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Back to the future. Who needs DNA when you have proteins.
Remembering Dorothy Tamasia, barefoot banana curator of the Solomon Islands
Some bad news from Tony Jansen, via Facebook. He has kindly given us permission to reproduce his post here. This comes after more sad news from the Pacific just a few weeks ago.
I’m very sad to hear the tragic news that my very good friend Dorothy Tamasia has died. I dont know the hows or whats, only that she was too young. She was the true embodiment of the barefoot curator and lived out her life in very basic conditions with her people in the highlands of central Makira and passionately collected, protected and shared across her island and throughout the Solomon Islands over 108 varieties of bananas that she took part in collecting with Kastom Gaden Association. She was trained in morphological descriptors and management of germplasm collections despite having little formal education. Her work in documenting and maintaining her banana collection led to Solomon Islands being recognised as holding one of the largest remaining and least documented collection of banana diversity in the world – and she was a leading figure in a revival in banana diversity and its cultural connections in Makira through diversity fairs and other events.
Banana is the staple food in Makira. Dorothy was a hero for conservation in use of plant genetic resources and she dedicated much of her too short life to that purpose. She took part in pioneering work to test and promote high vitamin A fei banana varieties. A poster from that work can be seen here and she was part of banana diversity work supported variously by ACIAR, the SPC Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT) and Seed Savers Network.
I last saw her in late 2011 after making the 4 hour walk to her village from the coast — which has no roads and is one of the most remote parts of a remote country. She was happy, and had recently started a bush early-childhood pre-school in a leaf house in a remote riverside location where she lived on her own with her children. The room was full of brightly coloured creations from nearby village children who came to her school — and surrounded by her bananas and her cacao farm. She was excited to be studying early childhood education. She was also busy duplicating, on her own, the banana collection she had maintained for almost a decade — back breaking work with no reward other than the custodianship that she treasured. She had a deep grasp of the issues including the controversy around crop genetic resources. She chose to keep above all of it and just continue her humble work that she knew was the right thing and a useful thing to do.
Dorothy was a beautiful person and a kind hearted and generous soul. I hope that in her death her life work and commitment to the Solomon Islands indigenous plant genetic resources and to food security for her people will be acknowledged and that the collections she had maintained will be supported to continue.