Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Home of the potato, a set by PRI’s The World on Flickr.
Today’s PRI piece on how an old potato is helping Andean farmers cope with climate change also points to some fun spud photos (see above) which are in fact all of potatoes, unlike in the recent NatGeo disaster. And to a great video of CIP Director General Pamela Anderson eating chips (crisps), which she really shouldn’t do because they’re not very healthy (the chips, not the potatoes), but what the hell.
The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as “slash and burn”), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous policies like taxation, conscription, and forced labor.
Now, I don’t know if this is a valid summary of the thesis of James C. Scott’s latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009), or a flight of fancy on the part of the reviewer of the book in The Chronicle of Higher Education. But characterizing swidden agriculture based on root crops as part of a strategy of tax evasion by the hill tribes of SE Asia is certainly novel.
I think a brief follow-up to yesterday’s foray down Memory Lane might be in order, lest you all go away thinking that I’ve lost my marbles. So, yes, according to Ramnath’s comment I was right, the large, global collection of jute assembled at the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute starting in the 70s did indeed receive a sort of blessing from IBPGR (the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources) in the late 1980s when it became part of the Global Network of Base Collections. It wasn’t on the list in 1985. But it had made it by the time of the IBPGR Annual report for 1989. I know that because googling threw up a link to the paper “Plant Genetic Resources Activities: International Perspective” by R.K Arora, R.S. Paroda and J.M.M. Engels, and that includes a handy table. Alas, that link, which should take one to Bioversity International’s (that’s what IBPGR became) website, is broken. Fortunately, the cache is there, at least for a while, and I have been able to save the paper as a pdf for you.
We don’t hear much about the Global Network of Base Collections any more. It would be interesting to know if the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute still feels itself to be part of it. I suspect not. Of course, things have changed a lot since 1989. But what’s to stop BJRI proposing to place its collection under Article 15 of the International Treaty on PGRFA? Others have…
And as for that IBPGR-funded collecting for Corchorus in Kenya that I could find no evidence of before, that must have been because I was searching for it incorrectly. My mole at the Collecting Missions Files Repository was able to identify it pretty quickly. 1 For the record, the missions took place in 1987-1988, under the leadership of I.R Denton of the International Jute Organization. And the material is still being used, as searching for that name in Google Scholar can tell you. But here’s how the source of material from those expeditions is being described in a fairly recent paper:
All the materials were obtained through the courtesy of the Director, Central Research Institute for Jute and Allied Fibers, Barrackpore, India, from the IJO world collection.
So people still recognize a “global jute collection,” but is it now located at the Central Research Institute for Jute and Allied Fibers, Barrackpore, India? Time for some further sleuthing, I guess.
A new series of booklets ‘African Priority Food Tree Species’ offers an important step in gathering existing information together, offering a synthesis of 11 priority food tree species native to sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Baobab and the Shea Butter tree. The series also includes recommendations for their conservation and sustainable use.
And very nice the results look too. But what the series of booklets also offers is a bit of an overlap with the Agroforestree Database. See for yourself for Blighia sapida: the SAFORGEN booklet vs the pdf you get from the Agroforestree database.
One does wonder to what extent Bioversity and ICRAF worked together on this, in the spirit of the shiny new CGIAR.
According to the BBC, there’s a resurgence of jute cultivation in Bangladesh.
It’s not that long ago that the International Jute Organization could think it worthwhile to support, of all things, a herbarium survey of the wild relatives of the crop. I also seem to remember a very comprehensive germplasm collecting mission in Kenya in the 1980s, organized by the then IBPGR and funded by the IJO, though I can find no evidence of it. There is some germplasm in the international system, though not nearly as much as in national genebanks in Bangladesh and India. In fact, I seem to remember that the collection at the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute had some kind of international status at one point. I wonder if those heady days will now return?
