Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
You may remember a post a few days ago in which Jeremy announced that Dr José F. M. Valls has won this year’s Meyer Medal. Well, José was briefly at SIRGEALC last week before going off to get his medal, and he gave a great talk on his life’s work on wild peanut conservation and use. Unfortunately, this terrible picture is the best I could do to capture the occasion. 1
Lois Englberger of the Island Food Community of Pohnpei has kindly agreed for us to publish her thoughts on the 19th International Congress of Nutrition.
I would like to share about our participation in the 19th International Congress of Nutrition (ICN), October 4-9, 2009, in Bangkok, Thailand, as part of the global health project, led by Professor Harriet Kuhnlein, Centre of Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE)/McGill University, and the CINE team.
The ICN was a huge event with 4560 delegates from 107 countries! Our oral presentations were on October 8, at the Symposium of Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems and Nutrition: Finding Solutions in Local Cultures and Environments, and were enthusiastically received.
I am happy to report that I wore my “Let’s Go Local” t-shirt and shared about the “Go Local” initiative.
Dr. Barbara Burlingame, Senior Nutrition Officer of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, also presented our Pohnpei Banana posters in her talk on food composition and biodiversity. This is an honor for Pohnpei! Thank you Barbara!
Also what a great privilege for Podis Pedrus and Kiped Albert, community leaders of Mand, Pohnpei, FSM, and myself to participate in the Satellite Workshop on Culture, Environment and Agriculture for Food and Nutrition Security of Indigenous Peoples, held 11-15 October in Thailand, supported by CINE and Thailand government.
This included academic and community leaders from the 12 case studies in the global health project led by Prof. Kuhnlein. The countries involved were Canada, Colombia, FSM, India, Japan, Nigeria, Peru, Tanzania, and Thailand. This was an extensive study of the traditional food system, diet and health, and implementation of a two-year promotion of local food for health.
We were delighted to visit the remote Sanephong Village in Thailand’s case study of the Karen people, as superbly coordinated by our colleagues from Mahidol University. What a special visit! Traveling to a remote Karen village, seeing the tremendous outpour of hospitality, learning about their work, enjoying a feast of traditional Thai food and beautiful dancing and singing, and even riding in an ox cart! Along with the visit to Sanephong, we had other field trips and an inspiring seminar at Mahidol University in Salaya, also coordinated by our Thai colleagues. There our Pohnpei team presented about our case study in Pohnpei, FSM.
This was based in Mand Community, Pohnpei. One of the project outcomes was the local food list, including scientific names and other information, and a total of 381 food items (what great diversity). After our two-year intervention, we were happy to find a significant increase in banana varieties consumed, increase in frequency of banana and giant swamp taro consumed, increased dietary diversity, and a positive change of attitude in the community.
We would like to thank again Professor Kuhnlein and the CINE team for involving Pohnpei, FSM; our Thai friends for their wonderful hospitality; our fellow case study friends; the ICN organizers and participants; and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) for support for our participation in the event.
For more information about the global health project, see:
www.mcgill.ca/cine/resources/data/pohnpei/ — food photos/nutrient content
www.indigenousnutrition.org — documentaries
www.fao.org/docrep/012/i0370e/i0370e00.htm — recently published book 2
Our friend Andy Jarvis and co-workers recently published a paper in the Journal for Nature Conservation entitled “Assessment of threats to ecosystems in South America.” Very interesting in its own right, but check out the map below. Andy has very kindly superimposed for us the location of peanut and potato wild relatives on the ecosystem threat map from the paper. A good way to prioritize conservation? You saw it here first.
I haven’t been posting lately because I’m in Pucon, Chile at the 7th SIRGEALC, and pretty busy networking. That wouldn’t stop me normally, but also the wi-fi has not been entirely reliable, though it seems to be ok now. Anyway, SIRGEALC brings together agrobiodiversity researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean every two years, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. More later.
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…
…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.
What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.