Author: Luigi Guarino

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Prizes for agrobiodiversity movers and shakers

Two of the recipients of the 16th Heinz Awards for “providing solutions to global environmental challenges,” announced yesterday, have agricultural biodiversity connections. Cary Fowler’s work is of course well know to our readers:

At a time of massive environmental change, it is an absolute necessity to preserve the world’s crop biodiversity. Lack of crop diversity threatens the world’s basic food security, and it is highly significant that scientists like Dr. Fowler work to strengthen inventories of plant genetic resources.

Gretchen Daily’s perhaps less so.

Dr. Gretchen Daily is a globally renowned scientist and Stanford University professor who is acknowledged for her innovative work to calculate the financial benefits of preserving the environment. Dr. Daily has advanced a remarkable new vision that harmonizes conservation and human development. Her work illuminates the many valuable benefits that flow from “natural capital” – embodied in Earth’s lands, waters and biodiversity – to supporting human well-being.

Today she also won a Midori biodiversity prize.

Much of Daily’s research seeks to get businesses thinking about the environment. In 2004, she published a paper showing that coffee plants located near forests in Costa Rica are more productive than other plants because they are pollinated by bees living in the forest. The bees boost the yearly income of the average farm by $60,000, she estimated.

Maybe the two recipients should get together and figure out how to get business to pay for genebanks. Congratulations to both.

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Featured: Taro leaf blight in Cameroon

Zachee Ngoko confirms many experts’ worst fears about a new taro disease in Cameroon:

Our investigation, confirmed by CABI showed that P. colocassiae is the agent responsible in Cameroon from lab. analysis and rapid mount… But we are in the process of having more information on the situation with the help from CABI/Global Plant Clinic, UK. More information will come out as soon as available.

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From Genes to Landscapes in Mesoamerica

From a special correspondent at the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes.” Taking place 20-24 September 2010, at CATIE, Turrialba, Costa Rica.

Four days packed with presentations and discussions on Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica. And what biodiversity! Beans, maize, coffee, cacao, peppers … there is little to match the domestication feats of Central America! As part of the backdrop to the meeting, hosted by CATIE in Costa Rica, the gently fuming Volcano Turrialba is a quiet reminder of the turbulent rise and fall of civilisations and the dynamism and resilience of their culture.

The dynamism of agricultural systems was a striking recurrent theme of the first day’s talks; a morning dedicated to agricultural landscapes and an afternoon on the agricultural diversity in the landscapes. The symposium organiser, Fabrice DeClerck of CATIE, gave an inspiring introduction to the meeting, insisting that biodiversity is no longer a luxury item on the world’s development agenda. No-one needs to persuade policy makers anymore that biodiversity is central to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals — a point made by Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier in Conservation for the People.

The issue is not so much the importance of biodiversity anymore, but how to pin it down … or at least how to focus on the important parts. Chili peppers are not spicy because we like them that way. Or not only. The heat-inducing biochemicals make the chili seeds resistant to attack from fungi while maintaining their attractive appeal to bird dispersers. Human’s domestication and use of chili peppers as a major ingredient in indigenous cuisine the world over, of course, is a happy sideline to what is clearly the result of very dynamic ecosystem processes. So which bits to save?

Jeremy Haggar of CATIE illustrated further the amazing dynamism of agricultural systems. In a study of tree species in coffee agroforestry systems he inventoried 16 smallholder farms in Nicaragua. Among the 110 tree species he identified, farmers selected a small number of species (5 or 6) that they wished to remove from their farms in favour of more useful species. Three years later, returning to the same farms, he was surprised to find that more than 30 of 110 species had disappeared, but that some 30 species were also new to the farms. Natural processes of colonisation had been considerably more effective at changing species composition than the farmers!

Jeremy also rang alarm bells, repeated by a number of speakers, about another looming source of dynamism, climate change. There will be a 60% reduction in the area suitable for coffee cultivation in Central America by 2050, as these cultural systems are driven uphill. Systems may be dynamic but it is not clear how ultimately resilient they are.

From the species perspective, Xavier Scheldeman of Bioversity International and Daniel Debouck of CIAT both described loss of populations of unique crop diversity: Capsicum flexuosum, a rare chili wild relative, has disappeared from the few collecting sites from which it was known in Paraguay as soybean cultivation has taken over. Similarly, one of the few populations of a wild bean species in Costa Rica has been built over. New populations of C. flexuosum have, fortunately, been found using targeted, GIS-aided collecting. The bean is also, thankfully, safely secured in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

So far, no connection has been made between crop species or relatives with priority traits for conservation and the ecosystems or landscapes in which they may be conserved. Clearly, a little more joined up thinking is needed. Bringing together this mixed bunch of scientists is a good start, and at the end of the four days the intention is to develop a white paper to guide policy-makers on priorities for agrobiodiversity conservation in Mesoamerica. Stay tuned!

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On local greens and homegardens and local greens

ResearchBlogging.orgGreat to see two papers by our friends at Bioversity come out in rapid succession recently relating to two project with which I was marginally connected in their early stages back in the 90s. One is on African leafy vegetables (ALV) 1, a common subject here. And the other on homegardens 2.

The ALV paper tries to measure the impact of the work carried out starting in the mid-90s to identify and address key constraints to production and consumption. This is fairly easy to do in terms of research papers published and MSc degrees awarded, but more tricky when it comes to measuring what ALVs mean to the people who eat them. The authors tried to do this through fieldwork at four sites in Kenya. There’s no doubt there has been an increase in ALV production and marketing during the past 10 years, and a significant change in perceptions about these species, which are no longer considered simply “food for the poor.” Their presence in upmarket Nairobi supermarkets is testament to that. What still needs to be verified is that this is leading to significant nutrition and health benefits.

A particularly poignant aspect of this study was the way it highlighted the importance of one person, the late Prof. James Chewya of the University of Nairobi, in driving the early ALV work, in particular by influencing young researchers to get involved. Jim is still much missed.

The homegardens paper is less specifically tied in to the Bioversity project on this topic which began in the early 90s, being essentially a review of the literature of the past couple of decades. 3 It rehearses the biological features of homegardens, in particular their complexity and diversity, stresses their cultural and socio-economic importance, and describes how these drive each other. The section on the future of homegardens as loci for research and conservation is especially interesting in its juxtaposition of the somewhat different roles of these intensive micro-environments in developing and high-income countries. 4

In developing countries, the nutritional value of local, neglected horticultural species has been assessed and their cultivation in family gardens promoted to guarantee the intake of vitamins and micro-nutrients aiding in the control of HIV infections and other diseases. Establishment of food producing gardens, often based on local seed systems and traditional crops, in areas of explosive urbanization is becoming an important tool for making cities more sustainable while also providing marginal sectors of the population with working opportunities, healthier food and reinforcing their cultural identity.

Well, couldn’t you say much the same of the situation in the US and Europe?

In high-income countries the growing demand for healthier lifestyles and closer connection with nature has driven a renewed interest towards sustainable agricultural systems and ‘‘traditional’’ food products, capable of connecting consumers to the natural and cultural heritage of a community or a geographical region.

True enough, but the ALV experience in Kenya shows that this trend is not confined to places where Slow Food is active. Surely there is more scope for mutual learning.

If there’s one thing that disappointed me a little in reading through these two papers is the seeming lack of cross-fertilization between them. ALV are increasingly common in urban homegardens in Kenya. It would have been nice to see the lessons learned in the course of these two major projects brought together somehow. Maybe something along those lines is in the offing. I hope so. But that is to quibble. It is wonderful to see undervalued species, and the overlooked micro-environments where they often grow, coming into their own.

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Protecting the potato one variety at the time

FreshInfo has just published a little piece saying that a foundation has been set up to save potato varieties in perpetuity. Alas, the announcement is behind a registration wall, but it is really too important to keep hidden like that, so I’m reproducing it in full below. There is no link on the article, and nothing on the CIP website or Facebook page. Very strange. You heard it here first.

A new international foundation is being set up to protect potato varieties in perpetuity and is appealing for individuals and companies to show their support and become Heroes for Life.

The Roots for Life Foundation has been several years in the making and launches officially on 1 October. It is the brainchild of chairman and Lincolnshire potato grower Jim Godfrey, working with Dr Pamela K Anderson who heads up the International Potato Centre (known internationally as CIP) in Peru, Canadian grower Peter van der Zaag and Edinburgh bio-technology entrepreneur Simon Best.

CIP holds an in-trust collection of more than 4,000 native potato varieties in its gene bank and Roots for Life hopes to mark this year’s International Year of Biodiversity with its fundraising campaign to protect them.

Godfrey said: “In the genetic biodiversity of these native potatoes lie the answers to food security in a world where climate change, water and land shortages, and an energy crisis threaten global food security. The CIP gene bank is a trust fund for our survival.”

Roots for Life is appealing for Heroes for Life to each donate $5,000 and protect one of the varieties. This will raise some $21 million – less than the amount US consumers spend on French fries each day.

The website will go live on 1 October and the foundation hopes to announce all the heroes in Svalbard, Norway, home of the Global Seed Vault.

“A Wall of Heroes will be built at the gene bank in Lima bearing the names of the individuals, groups and institutions who have stepped up to this challenge for the benefit of future generations,” said Godfrey.