Author: Luigi Guarino

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EarthStat has crop stats

Those of you last summer who followed a link in a post of ours on crop distribution mapping to

…the dataset of Monfreda et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000″…

will have ended up on a file directory containing a whole bunch of crop-specific zip files, from which you could have eventually extracted the modeled distribution of, say, coffee:

coffee

Or whatever. Nice, but all a bit fiddly. Well, now there’s a much nicer way of downloading the data in all kinds of useful forms, including Google Earth files. Though you do have to register.

I wonder if ICARDA used these data, or some others, to do their recent work on the impact of climate change on wheat in Central Asia. Difficult to tell from the blurb.

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Yes, we have many solutions

IITA has a pretty nice video out about controlling Banana Xanthomonas Wilt via genetic modification.

Now, don’t jump to any conclusions, I have nothing against genetic modification of banana. In fact, if you’re going to use genetic modification on anything, bananas should be right up there. No chance of that pesky transgene escaping into the wild, for a start. Although I would like to know how they’re planning to engineer resistance into the dozens of varieties that are important in East Africa. Wait, you mean they’re not going to do that? Just a few, eh?

Well, anyway. My main point is that the video gives no hint at all that, as far as BXW control is concerned at any rate, there are other, perfectly viable, options. And IITA knows this, because it has been involved in the development of a pretty effective, multi-faceted, low-cost, integrated, sustainable strategy for control. One that doesn’t involve the threat of reducing the diversity of the crop.

Of course, it would help if there were similarly nice videos about that. There are factsheets galore, true. Lots of factsheets. But videos? Well, maybe you can get them to work. And anyway they don’t really seem to be aimed at the general audience so clearly targeted by IITA’s vid. How can we make the case that there are occasionally more appropriate, sustainable solutions than GMOs when we can’t even win the battle of the videos?

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Nibbles: CGIAR vision, GFAR vision, UNEP vision, Tree seeds, Aerial vision, Visions of potatoes, Soybeans, DNA sequencing, Rewilding