Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Defra and the Welsh Assembly Government have come up with a ten-year plan to sort out honey bees in England and Wales, to be called ‘Healthy Bees.’ The first step?
…to improve our contacts with all beekeepers so that we can ensure they take advantage of the free inspection and diagnostic services that the bee unit and its dedicated team of inspectors and scientists provide.
Hence BeeBase.
Sandy Knapp is a botanist at the Natural History Museum in London. She’s currently in the field in China investigating the domestication of aubergines with Wang JinXiu from the Institute of Botany in Beijing. You can follow their exploits on her blog, which features on the museum’s NaturePlus compendium of online fora.
From André Heitz.
Approval of genetically modified varieties in Europe is governed by a strange rule: a qualified majority of member States in Council is required for either approving or rejecting a GMV, and if a qualified majority does not obtain, the decision is entrusted to the European Commission. For the last twelve years — a period of time in which GMVs rose from some 30 to some 134 million hectares worldwide — member States have always managed to create the stalemate that threw the hot potato onto a shy Commission preoccupied by its standing rather than effectiveness.
Things may have changed on 2 March 2010, when the Commission — ending a process that started in January 2003 — approved BASF’s Amflora potato for cultivation for industrial use (it is a starch potato composed almost exclusively of amylopectin) and authorised the use of its by-products as feed. At the same time, it authorised the placing on the market of three GM maize products (MON863xMON810, MON863xNK603, MON863xMON810xNK603) for food and feed uses, but not for cultivation.
Not unexpectedly, these decisions provoked the ire of “environmental groups” and some member States. In the Amflora case, the controversy centres on the presence of an antibiotic resistance marker gene.
Whether those decisions are a positive signal for GMVs in Europe is quite uncertain, however.
Firstly, the cultivation authorisation for Amflora is subject to restrictions to prevent the mixing of the GM potato with conventional or organic potatoes. Sounds reasonable, but the measures are nothing but good crop husbandry and industrial practices, moreover in the context of a crop that will be grown exclusively under contract with a limited number of processors. The upshot is that this potato is still treated like a delinquent requiring close scrutiny. Ironically, if we exclude the ARM nptII gene (now present elsewhere on millions of hectares) and the changed proportion of amylopectin and amylose, Amflora is no different from conventional starch potatoes.
Secondly, it is understood that member States will be free to refuse the cultivation of Amflora (at present, member States can only derogate to the principle of a single market under strict conditions). The Commission will also produce a “proposal by the summer setting out how a Community authorisation system, based on science, can be combined with freedom for Member States to decide whether or not they wish to cultivate GM crops on their territory”.
Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner, John Dalli stated: “Responsible innovation will be my guiding principle when dealing with innovative technologies. After an extensive and thorough review of the five pending GM files, it became clear to me that there were no new scientific issues that merited further assessment. All scientific issues, particularly those concerning safety, had been fully addressed. Any delay would have simply been unjustified. By taking these decisions, the European Commission fulfils its role in a responsible manner.” There is every reason to expect that national governments — and why not also regional and local authorities — will not decide on the same basis when confronted with irrational arguments and electoral pressure.
For more, both with further links:
“We didn’t get the permit” to export the wasp, said Fabian Haas, head of the Biosystematics Support Unit at the Kenya-based International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology.
He was trying to bring the wasps from Sri Lanka to Kenya to fight the fruit flies which made the same journey accidentally in 2003 and are now ravaging mangoes in Africa. Seems unfair. Maybe the CBD’s meeting in Japan in October will sort it all out. Or maybe not.
There’s news from Kew that its GIS Unit has an interactive map out looking at the geographic distribution of plant diversity at the genus and family level. Here’s how they did it:
For each genus of flowering plants, distributions were compiled principally from the specimens held in Kew’s Herbarium. In addition, standard reference floras and checklists for each region of the world (as far as possible) were consulted for doubtful distribution records (such as only one or a few specimens of any genus from a particular region, or doubtfully identified specimens). Many hundreds of individual articles were also consulted, and whether or not a genus was native, doubtfully native, doubtfully present or introduced was noted. Only presence has been recorded; regions from which a genus is absent are not listed, and there is no record of abundance, extent of distribution within regions, or numbers of species either of genera or within regions.
It’s nice enough and all, but I don’t really understand it. I mean, why use those funny regions? Why not proper ecoregions? What’s wrong with just using countries? Anyway, it would be interesting to know if something similar is being planned for the plants conserved in the Millennium Seed Bank, which was coincidentally in the news again this week. Or, indeed, with the material conserved by the international genebanks of the CGIAR system, data on which is to be found in the SINGER database.