Author: Robert Hijmans

Posted on

Plan of action against UG99

Despite reassuring words from the Indian Minister of Agriculture at the start of the meeting ((A while ago the Indian Council for Agricultural Research also suggested that UG99 was not a major threat to wheat production in India)), FAO announced that delegates of the 31 countries represented at the “International Conference on Wheat Stem Rust Ug99 – A Threat to Food Security” in New Delhi have pledged to support prevention and control of UG99. They agreed:

  • to share surveillance information;
  • that a global early warning system should be immediately established;
  • that plant breeding research should be intensified; and
  • that rust resistant wheat varieties should be distributed to farmers.
Posted on

Hybrid rice going south

Hybrid rice has been the dominant form of rice seed in China for a while. It has also been spreading to Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines and other places. As you know, seed companies like hybrids because farmers who use them need to buy new seed every year. Farmers like the higher yields. It seems that multinational seed companies are increasing their investments in rice hybrids for Asia. Bayer just announced that is has opened up shop in Suphanburi, a rice growing region north of Bangkok. Thailand is a country hitherto better known for rice quality and exports, than for the use of high yielding varieties. Photo credit: Bayer

Posted on

Who Owns Nature?

There is a new report, “Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life” from the ETC group.

It talks of corporate concentration in:

  • farm input (from thousands of seed companies and public breeding institutions three decades ago, 10 companies now control more than two-thirds of global proprietary seed sales);
  • food output (supermarkets);
  • pharmaceuticals; and
  • the New Post-Petroleum sugar industry (“the so-called ‘sugar economy’ will be the catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter –- and destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale”).

Their (not so new) bottom line on seeds:

So-called climate-ready genes are a false solution to climate change. Patented gene technologies will not help small farmers survive climate change, but they will concentrate corporate power, drive up costs, inhibit public sector research and further undermine the rights of farmers to save and exchange seeds.

Posted on

The Cure of Agues

ResearchBlogging.orgThe Royal Society Digital Journal Archive, dating back to 1665, is freely accessible until 1 February 2009. Enjoy it while it lasts, and read papers by Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Stephen Hawking.

In its announcement, the Society mentions a paper representing an applied biodiversity breakthrough: Edward Stone’s discovery that willow bark cured fevers, leading to the discovery of salicylic acid and later the development of aspirin. It is the best substance I have ever used. ((Ed.: And what’s the best substance you’ve ever abused?))

In his letter to the Royal Society (and they really were letters back in 1763), Stone explains how he did it. After accidentally (no further explanation) tasting willow bark, and noticing its bitterness, he suspected it might have properties similar to that of the Peruvian bark (i.e., of the cinchona tree, containing quinine). That willows grow in swampy areas was also a reason to suspect its usefulness against agues (malaria and other fevers), following “the general maxim that many natural maladies carry their cures along with them.” I suppose that today this maxim could be used for integrated pest management.

Then he applies the scientific method. Literature review: no mention of medicinal properties of the willow. Methods: 5 years, 50 persons, dose, comparisons and mixes with quinine, evaluation of side effects. The only thing missing in the 1760s is a control treatment. But who needs a placebo if the medicine never fails to cure?

Great man, great discovery? Well, willow had been in use for millennia, but perhaps Stone did not know, he did not have wikipedia.

The wikipedians also note that the use of willow “was forgotten by doctors in the middle ages but lived on in folk medicine.” This makes the accidental tasting a bit fishy. Sounds to me like the story of a bio-prospector who took off along a winding path, talked to an old lady, and was too vain to acknowledge her. Pure speculation, and I am glad he did the experiments and wrote that letter.

Stone was a terroirist: “Few vegetables are equal in every place; all have their peculiar soils, where they arrive to a greater perfection than in any other place.” Mustard seed from Durham; saffron from particular spots in Essex and Cambridgeshire; cider apples from Herefordshire; valerian from Oxfordshire and Glocestershire.

He gathered his willow bark from trees in northern Oxfordshire, where “soils are chiefly dry and gravelly”. And thus he suspected that stronger stuff could be found in other – moist and moory – parts of the kingdom. A modern genebank manager could have reasoned the same way.

Any other nuggets on agricultural biodiversity in these archives? We have until February to dig for them. After that: please report on all peculiar tasting substances you encounter, particularly if bitter, and whether ingested by accident or not.

Posted on

Combining intervention and research

By Jacob van Etten.

ResearchBlogging.orgDo you know the PLEC Serv List? Harold Brookfield and Helen Parsons select a peer-reviewed article on agrobiodiversity management and write a fairly long, but always interesting, summary of it, placing it in its wider context. Even though the agrobiodiversity project after which the list is called ended several years ago, Brookfield and Parsons faithfully continue it. Subscription highly recommended.

Harold Brookfield and Edwin A. Gyasi now write in Geoforum about geographical action research. They argue it is time for geographers to get their hands and boots dirty. PLEC and the Wageningen-led Convergence of Sciences (CoS) project illustrate that research and service can and should go hand in hand. Geographers are late to recognize this, and in sister-discipline anthropology there is a far longer tradition of activism.

PLEC started by making inventories of farmers’ practices and knowledge in the areas they worked. As a result, the researchers got to know the most knowledgeable and innovative farmers. These farmers, they write, are likely to be hiding in the corners.

They cite Kojo Amanor’s poetic comment that “rather than sitting under the fig tree at the chief’s palace with dignitaries, [indigenous environmental knowledge] is best explored by taking off along the winding paths and discovering the extremities of the village, the chop bars with their bush-meat soup, the drinking spots, the jokers, the old women with their pithy comments, and the young women carrying water.”

The contacts with innovative farmers helped to set up networks in which knowledge was exchanged and new things were tried. Projects like this demonstrate how much academic scientists have to offer to the people among whom they work, and how research interests can be both broadened and deepened in so doing. There is profit in combining a measure of intervention with research.

I agree with the main thrust of the article, but I also think there are many thorns on the road. Many of the problems encountered by the Wageningen researchers lay in the institutional domain, leading to frustrated comments like “the only dependable institution in the West African rural scene is the market trader with her sense for business and entrepreneurship.”

The other problem is that working with farmers takes time, more time than normal project cycles. Only toward the end of the project did the full value of combining service with research begin to become apparent.

PLEC was discontinued. Even so, PLEC and similar projects continue to live on in other incarnations. Brookfield and Gyasi encourage others to set up similar research projects. And share their experiences.