- Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
- Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
- When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
- The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
- Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
- San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
- New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Then. Now. Next.
Twenty years ago this month, the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog was born. Typically, the first thing we wrote about was a genebank in crisis.
In October 2006, Typhoon Xangsane — known locally as Milenyo — tore through the Philippines. It damaged the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory, with mud everywhere. The genebank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), just down the road, luckily came through largely unscathed, and IRRI offered its facilities to help the Philippine national system recover.
Reading that little post twenty years later is pretty sobering. The underlying problem hasn’t gone away. Genebanks may be grandily described as custodians of crop diversity, but they are also buildings — dependent on staff, electricity, equipment, roads and functioning institutions. A typhoon or prolonged power outage can turn a well-run collection into one that’s in trouble almost overnight.
But it’s not all bad news. Something has changed. I think the crop diversity conservation community now thinks much more explicitly about risk and recovery. Safety duplication, backup equipment and disaster preparedness are a much bigger part of the way we plan long-term conservation. The growth of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the fact that safety-duplication arrangements are embedded in standard operating procedures and performance metrics reflect a recognition that no genebank, however well managed, can be assumed to be permanently secure.
The Philippines story also points to something else that has become increasingly clear over the past two decades: genebank resilience is a property of a network, not just an individual institution. IRRI was able to help because it was nearby, unaffected and connected to the national system. But mutual support on that scale only works when institutions have relationships, systems for sharing material and experience and, crucially, reserves of goodwill and trust.
Since that first year, we’ve written about a daunting range of threats to agricultural biodiversity — droughts, floods, wars, political upheavals, budget cuts, pests, diseases, climate change and, inevitably, the occasional freezer failure. We’ve also written about the success stories though — the people and institutions rescuing and nurturing crop diversity, often with limited resources, putting it to work, and making the case for its importance.
A lot has changed since 2006. The technologies are fancier. The vocabulary is different. We have vastly more data, better tools and a deeper understanding of crop diversity and the systems needed to conserve it.
But some of the fundamental challenges remain stubbornly familiar.
Perhaps that’s one of the unexpected pleasures of an archive such as this blog provides. It is of course a record of what we thought was important at the time. But it is also a way of discovering that some of the problems we think are new today have been sitting there, quietly and not so quietly, for a while.
The blog has changed too, of course. In the early days, we were largely pointing to interesting things we had found. Over time, that has gradually turned into something maybe a tad more analytical. We now spend more time connecting the dots between different kinds of diversity, questioning claims that don’t quite stand up, and asking what new research actually means, especially for farmers.
So, as we celebrate twenty years of the evolution of the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, let’s remember that there is still much to discover — and quite a lot to rediscover. Do delve into our archive. You never know: the answer to a question you are asking today may already be there, in a discussion we had last week, or 20 years ago.
And if it’s not, we hope you at least have as much fun looking for it as we had writing about it.
Eat this ravioli
Jeremy’s latest Eat This Newsletter tackles cassava, the chestnut, rice and pears. But his coolest find is a website called Flavour Lines, that allows you to find out, among other things, how far you are from a restaurant whose sign outside advertises biryani as opposed to pulao, or ravioli as opposed to pierogi.
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review. Traditional foods contribute to dietary diversity, micronutrient intake and food security. Nutrition policy should pay more attention to what people used to eat.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Soil-focused regenerative practices are associated with more diverse diets, through a mixture of production, income and market effects. Soil health has a dietary dimension.
- The Relationship among Food Environment Types, Diet, and Nutrition Outcomes in Women, Children, and Adolescents from Low- and Lower-Middle Income Countries. What surrounds people matters as much as what they grow: food environments influence dietary diversity and nutrition in complicated ways, but access to wild foods is usually a good thing.
- Allele-specific expression reveals complex regulatory divergence underlying fruit phenotypic differences between cultivated and wild tomato species. Wild tomato relatives harbour genetic variation for sugars, volatiles and other flavour traits that domestication left behind. A reminder that “improvement” can be a process of subtraction. Not nutrition you say? I bet flavour is connected with nutrition — in complicated ways.
- Large-scale phenotyping and multi-trait selection identify low-methane Napier grass accessions under contrasting environmental conditions. Napier grass accessions differ substantially in methane yield, digestibility and other traits. Feed diversity could help reduce livestock emissions without sacrificing everything else. Cows need better nutrition too.
The bit in between
We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process is what happens between those places.
A new IIED report, Nature Nurture: How to keep agrobiodiverse forest and farm systems alive in the modern world, looks at local collective community organisations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania and how they support on-farm conservation and use of crop diversity. In Tanzania, community seed banks lend seed to farmers, who return it after harvest; seed exchanges have brought previously little known local varieties into the banks. In the Philippines, a demonstration farm maintains traditional sweetpotato varieties for distribution. In Indonesia, producer groups run nurseries while much seed management remains in farmers’ hands.
Farmer-run seed banks, demonstration farms and nurseries give communities ways to organise for themselves the conservation and use of crop diversity. That’s great. But what if something goes wrong? A crop disappears from a village. A variety falls out of use in a district. A community seed bank loses its stock. And what if a variety being maintained in one place could be useful somewhere else, perhaps very far away?
This is where the bit in between comes into play.
Nature Nurture has very little to say about how seeds and knowledge move to and fro between farmers and community organisations on one side and formal genebanks on the other. It recognizes their complementarity, but deals with it in a single sentence: “While ex-situ conservation remains an important safeguard against genetic erosion, the farmer-led and Indigenous systems that actively sustain agrobiodiversity within living production landscapes must have greater recognition and investment.” That’s all true, but somehow insufficient.
The report does promise practical guidance for collective organisations in its next phase. How they can connect with national genebanks would be a good place to start. Meanwhile, though, national genebanks should be doing the same. Maybe by re-thinking their information systems, as I suggested a few days ago.