- Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Resilience, but at a cost.
- Avenues for improving farming sustainability assessment with upgraded tools, sustainability framing and indicators. A review. How to measure an important aspect of the above-mentioned resilience.
- Envisaging an Effective Global Long-Term Agrobiodiversity Conservation System That Promotes and Facilitates Use. To effectively guarantee the resilience of farmers and the food system, genebank accessions for likely future use need to be distinguished dynamically from those for immediate use on the basis of the best available data, and then managed differently.
- Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene. Naturalization of phylogenetically diverse exotic plants from Australia, the Pacific and Europe is leading to a more homogeneous world flora. Much the same could be said of diets, come to think of it, except maybe for the geographic source of the plants, which is interesting in itself.
- Identifying science-policy consensus regions of high biodiversity value and institutional recognition. And less than a third of the bits of the Earth that everyone thinks are important in terms of biodiversity are protected, including from the above exotics.
- Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. There was a 9% increase in cropland area in 2003-2019, mainly in Africa and South America, half of it replacing natural vegetation.
- Include biodiversity representation indicators in area-based conservation targets. Needed because of the above exotic invasives and cropland expansion, among other things.
- Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Those new cropland areas will soon be in trouble. Unless genebanks and plant breeding, I guess.
- Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty. Could that cropland grow gene-edited crops in an agroecological setting? Yes, but that will require recognizing that agroecology is not a setting.
- Plant biodiversity and the regeneration of soil fertility. Restoring biodiversity restores soil fertility too.
- Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health and the environment. Replace just 10% of meat calories with fruit and veggies for the win-win. Is this the answer to all of the above? Well, maybe, maybe not.
Nibbles: Aurochs, Horse domestication, Tanzanian seeds, Legume portal, MGIS, ISF, Mexico & Philippines
- A wild relative making a comeback in Europe.
- Can wild horses be far behind?
- An effort to bring back traditional foods in Tanzania.
- A new data portal on legumes.
- An old data portal gets an update.
- ISF resources on plant genetic resources.
- Mexican coconut and beverage resources are really Filipino resources.
What have genebanks ever done for us?
Dr Helen Anne Curry, an historian at the University of Cambridge, has a piece out to trail her much anticipated book, Endangered Maize.
I haven’t read the book yet, but the article is a brisk, knowledgeable and engaging run-through the history of crop diversity conservation in genebanks, using maize as a case study. Her conclusion is stark.
I’m sceptical that seed banks – still conceived today as the central element in successful conservation of genetic diversity in crop plants – offer the long-term solution we need.
But is this fair? I don’t think anyone who is serious about the conservation of crop diversity really thinks genebanks are “the” solution, or indeed even “central” to the effort. We’ve been talking about complementarity between ex situ and in situ conservation for decades now. Genebanks are a piece of a complex puzzle: an important piece — and important in different ways and to different extents for different crops — but just a piece.
Dr Curry is similarly skeptical about genetic erosion:
…[o]ne especially disruptive piece of evidence was the discovery that, in some places, farmers didn’t change over to newly introduced “high yielding” crop varieties, even when they had an opportunity to do so. Or that when farmers did adopt new seed, they also kept continued growing the older types, too. As a result, varieties slated for inevitable extinction in the 1950s hadn’t disappeared.
But again, we’ve known for a while that the reality of genetic erosion is not as straightforward as the all-too-common “75%” narrative. Though admittedly it has taken us way too long to put that in writing.
In any case, it’s great to see the work of genebanks analyzed from a new perspective, or at least one that we’re not particularly used to. There’s always something to learn.
The business of conservation
With the commercialization initiatives I’ve described here, there are now excellent opportunities to ensure the long-term survival of ‘heirloom’ varieties in the systems where they originated.
And that’s from a genebanker, Dr Mike Jackson! His recent blog post about his “conversion” is long, but well worth reading in full.
You might want to follow that up in a couple of days with ‘Is there a business case for forgotten crops?’, the next online event in the Forgotten Crops Society Dialogue Series. The topic will be discussed by Natasha Santos, Crop Science Division Vice President, Head of Global Stakeholder Affairs & Strategy Partnerships at Bayer AG. Another conversion?
Nibbles: Orphan crops, False banana, Kava, Old corn, Food museum, Yoghurt, Neolithic, Wheat breeding, Trees, Old clove, Monoculture history
- IFAD paean to neglected crops.
- BBC tribute to enset.
- Threnody to unsustainable kava.
- Hymn to a pot of ancient maize.
- Toast to a new museum of food in the UK.
- Jeremy’s duet with June Hersh on yoghurt.
- Scientific American epic on the European Neolithic.
- Rhapsody on saving wheat from climate change.
- Collection of important tree species from ICRAF.
- Panegyric to a clove tree.
- A eulogy for monoculture?