Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
An article in The Independent a few days ago on daily life in ancient Egypt included this intriguing snippet of information.
Similarly to today perhaps, wine was the booze of choice for high society individuals. Fine wines were labelled with the date, vineyard and variety as the tax assessors requested, such as the ones found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see a list of ancient Egyptian grape variety names…
Guests Tom Standage, business affairs editor of The Economist and author of An Edible History of Humanity joined Eric Tagliacozzo, associate professor of history at Cornell University and author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier and award-winning culinary expert Julie Sahni, author of Classic Indian Cooking to discuss food as a driving force behind economic expansion, industrial development and geopolitical competition.
And you can listen to the podcast, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.
The USDA’s National Agricultural Library has a bunch of “special collections” which are really just that — special. For example, check out the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. Here’s a taster, the Arkansas Black.
The Peruvian National Protected Areas Service has decided to allocate funds to help protect a large swath of the Amazon this year, which is home to several endangered species and indigenous groups.
The Protected Areas Service pledged to allocate USD 280,000 for surveillance activities in the massive area – encompassing a region larger than El Salvador – formed by the Alto Purus National Park and the Purus Communal Reserve. The protected area was officially created in 2004 in part through the support of WWF.
Interesting enough, but when we ran the WWF announcement by our resident expert on the agrobiodiversity of Amazonia, he had this to say:
Lots of unique peanut landraces are known to be cultivated by the Yaminahua — and surely other native groups — that live up in there on the Upper Purus.
It would be interesting to know if the Peruvian National Protected Areas Service’s surveillance activities extend to crop diversity. Maybe someone out there knows?
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the Amman conference on food security in the drylands has been all about germplasm and breeding, as far as adaptation to climate change is concerned. Cultural practices did get a look-in. Conservation agriculture in general, and zero tillage in particular, came up repeatedly, in fact. But of course, even when it’s not about germplasm, it’s really about germplasm. Because landraces and varieties are probably going to differ in their adaptation to these conditions. In fact, evidence to that effect is already there. An experiment at ICARDA showed last year that recently released varieties don’t do very well under zero tillage in general, but some do better than others. There’s bound to be a rush to screen all kinds of material under such practices.
Anyway, the highlight of the last day was a magisterial keynote from Peter Hazell of IFPRI on the role of agricultural policies and institutions in coping with climate change. It featured the first explanation of private weather index insurance that I’ve actually understood. He was very hopeful about the potential of such schemes, but said that the barriers to entry are still too high, which is why the 37 such programmes in 35 countries only add up to about a US$ 1 billion. Many many many times that will be needed. One of the main problems is the inadequacy of the system of weather stations in many countries. Another bit of infrastructure that is holding development back in rural areas.
Hazell also took part in the final panel discussion, which was very lively and lasted over two hours. He pointed out that the return to investment in agricultural research has really been rather good, and that probably the best hope for adaptation is more science. However, he did say that a breakthrough was needed from somewhere on the scale of the Green Revolution, and he did not see where that was coming from. He pointedly, I thought, did not mention biotechnology.
Well, it’s all over now. The panel session was followed by discussion of the draft Amman Declaration. Comments and amendments were considered, and the final version will be available in due course. But be not afraid, it features strong recommendations to collect and conserve biodiversity, and use it to breed new “climate-ready” crop varieties and build resilient production systems. And so to bed.
Read more on the conference at Rural Climate Exchange.