Luigi Guarino

May 10, 2013May 17, 2013

Suha Ashtar RIP

Dr Devra Jarvis of Bioversity International, formerly the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, reminisces about her late friend and colleague, Dr Suha Ashtar, on behalf of the global on-farm team.

Suha It is with great sadness that we heard of the passing of Suha Ashtar on 17 April 2013 in Aleppo. Suha was one of the first members of the “in situ family” that over the years worked at Bioversity International to establish a scientific basis for on farm conservation of crop biodiversity, together with colleagues from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mexico, Morocco, Peru and Vietnam. I remember my first meeting with Suha, when we were interviewing for the various regional staff to help me coordinate the global in situ programme, and being impressed by her lively and bright manner and her ability to forcefully express her own ideas and opinions. I still remember a short trip into the Italian countryside the core in situ project group took in a mini-bus, together with our donor, and the heated discussions about how the project should go, not to mention the calls for me to drive more slowly, as the back of the bus was shaking back and forth! Going through some old photos, I found a lovely one of Suha at the group dinner of a global meeting we had in Pokhara, Nepal in 1999 with colleagues from over 20 countries about working to support farmers in the assessment, management and gaining benefits from the conservation and use of traditional crop varieties. The dinner had followed long discussions and a hike up the hills nearby to meet with some local women and men farmers’ groups. Suha will be sorely missed by her colleagues and friends, and by myself especially as one of her first supervisors, when she was just setting out, young, intelligent and full of energy to start her career.

May 6, 2013April 30, 2013

Brainfood: Carrot domestication, Nigerian diets, Rotations & ecosystem services, Bangladeshi diets, Maize breeding sites, Olives and climate change, Mixtures and invertebrates, Genebank information systems

Genetic structure and domestication of carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus) (Apiaceae). Origin in Central Asia, but no genetic bottleneck (sic).
Data collection and assessment of commonly consumed foods and recipes in six geo-political zones in Nigeria: Important for the development of a National Food Composition Database and Dietary Assessment. Nigerians eat a lot of soup.
The integration of crop rotation and tillage practices in the assessment of ecosystem services provision at the regional scale. Good trick if you can do it.
Nutritional composition of minor indigenous fruits: Cheapest nutritional source for the rural people of Bangladesh. If only the rural people knew about this.
Effectiveness of selection at CIMMYT’s main maize breeding sites in Mexico for performance at sites in Africa and vice versa. Is high. Phew.
Olive trees as bio-indicators of climate evolution in the Mediterranean Basin. Olives in Germany by 2100?
Crop genetic diversity benefits farmland biodiversity in cultivated fields. Mixed wheat fields better for soil invertebrate biodiversity than fields with single varieties.
IT background of the medium-term storage of Martonvásár Cereal Genebank resources in phytotron cold rooms. The interesting thing is that the system links genebank data with breeders’ data. Don’t see that a lot.

May 3, 2013May 7, 2013

Conserving Prunus africana?

I’ve been sitting on it for a while, but a paper which AoB Blog discussed back in January led me to uncover a whole load of stuff on Prunus africana. The African Cherry Tree does not rate a leaflet in the African Food Tree Species series, perhaps because it’s not a, well, food tree, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Chemicals extracted from the tree’s bark are used in a range of pharmaceutical products to treat enlarged prostate (benign prostatic hyperplasia), an extremely common condition that affects up to half of men aged over 50.

Hence various efforts to develop sustainable harvesting methods. And also an interesting series of diversity and demographic studies:

Phylogeography of the Afromontane Prunus africana reveals a former migration corridor between East and West African highlands: “The high genetic similarity found between western Uganda and west African populations indicates that a former Afromontane migration corridor may have existed through Equatorial Africa.”
Structural diversity and regeneration of the endangered Prunus africana (Rosaceae) in Zimbabwe: “…poor regeneration, fewer P. africana trees in small and large size classes, dominance of positive height and diameter differentiation and high mingling.”
Divergent pattern of nuclear genetic diversity across the range of the Afromontane Prunus africana mirrors variable climate of African highlands: “The observed patterns indicate divergent population history across the continent most likely associated to Pleistocene changes in climatic conditions. The high genetic similarity between populations of West Africa with population of East Africa west of the Eastern Rift Valley … provides further evidence for a historical migration route. Contrasting estimates of recent and historical gene flow indicate a shift of the main barrier to gene flow from the Lake Victoria basin to the Eastern Rift Valley…”
Modelling the potential distribution of endangered Prunus africana (Hook.f.) Kalkm. in East Africa: “Prunus africana distribution is thus highly vulnerable to a warming climate and highlights the fact that both in-situ and ex-situ conservation will be a solution to global warming.”

Maybe we could do with some more seed behaviour data. But it would seem there is now plenty of diversity, demographic and sustainable harvesting information on which to base a comprehensive conservation strategy. Is someone coming up with one?

May 3, 2013May 6, 2013

Nibbles: GMO promises promises, African livestock outside & in, Vegetables galore, Farmer videos from US & Sri Lanka, Fermentation beery & otherwise, Yam people & traits, Botanic garden diversity, ECPGR, CWR in US & Benin, Herbarium data, Baobab info, Olean info, Pix, Indian cooking

Nature “celebrates” 30 years of GMOs.
African pastoralists know how not to destroy their livelihoods shock.
African urban dwellers keep livestock shock.
Vegetables can be perennial too. Oh yes indeedy. Not bitter gourd though, alas. Nor cucumber. And in other news, there’s a Bitter Melon Council. And also a campaign to promote zucchini in Iowa.
Climate change reaches farmers in the Pacific NW. Can their Sri Lankan colleagues be far behind?
Always good to have a beer story. Well, maybe not.
Speaking of fermentation, this WSJ piece looks interesting, from the two sentences of it I can read. No, wait. Oh crap, try this.
A hummus dip goes really nicely with beer. Is this the quinoa story again?
A yam conference for the ages. Will they discuss the new trait ontology?
Botanic gardens reach out. Genebanks next? Maybe not.
You mean like the European ones, perhaps?
That US CWR paper from the horse’s mouth. And a similar thing from Benin. But where does all that data come from?
Baobab notes to go with all those factsheets.
The Saharan olive needs a factsheet too. IRD obliges.
Cool set of agriculture photos.
A couple of different views of Indian food. Thanks to Cara de Silva and Diana Buja.

May 1, 2013April 30, 2013

Wheat diversity collections seen and unseen

A couple of things on wheat today, thanks to Tom Payne at CIMMYT, our go-to guy for all things triticaceous. First, Kew’s new page on Bread Wheat, which has a lot of useful information, including this:

About 250,000 samples of bread wheat are held in agricultural gene banks around the world, so the plant is far from being threatened. However, there is cause for concern in terms of bread wheat landraces, which are being replaced by modern cultivars and under threat of extinction if not already conserved in ex-situ collections.

The figure is I suspect from Genesys, from which the map below is taken. WIEWS, which covers many more genebanks, gives 546,797, but there’s probably much more duplication in that number than in the Genesys one.

And second, from the just published study “Agricultural Innovation: The United States in a Changing Global Reality,” a wide-ranging analysis of the benefits to the US of investment in international agricultural research, a discussion of the pedigree of the hard red winter wheat variety Jagger, the most widely planted wheat variety in the United States:

The breeders who developed Jagger drew on genetic material from all over the world and throughout the United States. Jagger was formed by crossing the breeding line KS82W418 (developed by the Kansas agricultural experimental station) with the variety Stephens (developed jointly by the Oregon agricultural experiment station and USDA-ARS). In turn, these two varieties stand firmly on the shoulders of the investments in scientific crop breeding over the past century and the eons of selection and seed-saving efforts of farmers since wheat was first domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Jagger’s ancestry includes varieties like Turkey Red from Russia, Noe from France, Federation and Purplestraw from Australia, Yaqui from Mexico, and Etawah from India.

Too bad that the closest the authors come to saying where those ancestors of Jagger, along with their 250,000 or 500,000 or whatever cousins, may be found, despite numerous references in the text to CIMMYT and USDA, is this laconic sentence:

In addition to the efforts of private citizens, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) sent its scientists to the far corners of the globe in search of better plant varieties.

Maybe I’ll send them that Kew link.