President Bust Bush apparently ordered a review and audit of Federally held scientific collections back in 2005. The report is just out. The article in the Washington Post about this dismisses genebanks in a few words (“rare seeds stockpiled by the Agriculture Department”), but the actual report has a bit more, including a box highlighting the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Ft Collins and making a reference to Svalbard (p 23), and a paragraph on GRIN (p 31). I think that’s pretty good going. The recommendations (starting on p 29) are a fun read. They’re directed at scientific collections of all types in the US — of seeds, herbarium specimens, stuffed animals, rock samples etc. But basically, if you applied them to genebanks globally, you wouldn’t go far wrong.
Mapping our blogging
On slow news days my mind turns to things meta. So here’s a map of our agrobiodiversity blogging. You can get a better, interactive one by clicking “Map” up on the menu bar at the top of the page.
Considering we haven’t been geo-referencing from the beginning, I think that’s not too bad a geographic coverage of the world’s agriculture. A few gaps, though. We’ll see what we can do about that.
Featured: Genetic erosion
After some kind words of encouragement for your faithful bloggers, as they plow their lonely furrow, Pablo unleashes hell on the genetic erosion meta-narrative:
I hope we can finally move beyond the unsubstantiated pseudostats on worldwide erosion of crop genetic diversity, more important and easier to quantify would be how much is being used in production systems where and by whom. Also there is the question of whether it is forever lost or can be recovered or expressed in new cultivars and crosses or in new environments.
As we’ve seen, that quantification of diversity in production systems could be done by looking at landrace names. Or could it?
Senate discusses wild rice
Good news for wild rice breeders, from Washington, DC of all places.
Funding for wild rice and forestry research cleared a Senate committee hurdle last week, said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn.
The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved $5.5 million in agriculture and economic development initiations that include new product research for wood and wild rice research.
A $300,000 appropriation would develop new and hardier strains of wild rice, Klobuchar said. It would fund research to tackle some of the most critical problems for wild rice producers, including shattering resistance, disease resistance, germplasm retention and seed storage.
Wild rice is the only cereal grain native to North America. Minnesota is the nation’s second-largest producer of wild rice, with production concentration near the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the Democratic senator said.
I’d really like to have heard the august US Senators debate the ins and outs of that 300 large. Maybe one of them explained what “germplasm retention” is.
Keeping their heads – and crops – above water
The BBC has a multi-media feature from Bangladesh called “Life above the Floods.” It looks at how the people of Char Atra, a low-lying silt island in the middle of the Ganges, cope with the yearly ravages of the monsoon’s flooding. Which will no doubt get worse as sea levels rise due to global climate change. I hate to say it, but there’s really not much that agricultural biodiversity will be able to do to help these people adapt to the effects of a global 2 degree C increase in temperatures.