Articles

July 20, 2007July 21, 2007

Bee shortage? What bee shortage?

An article in the New York Times this week suggests that the current scare over colony collapse disorder is nothing extraordinary. It has happened before and will probably happen again. What has been missing from the debate, some scientists say, is historical context. Records show that colonies were vanishing in the 19th century, when the cause was seen as lack of moral fibre. Bees that weren’t returning to their hives had “weak character”. And it happened in the late 1970s, when it was called “disappearing disease”. The disease too disappeared, and no cause was ever isolated.

One day we may know, and extra money for long-term monitoring (none has been forthcoming) may help. In the meantime, if the “crisis” has helped people appreciate the importance of bees as pollinators, and prompted deeper investigations, then that is surely A Good Thing. To prove the point, two deeply fascinating papers have been published in the past month showing that genetic diversity in honeybees and other social insects is also A Good Thing.

This is counterintuitive, because the reason social insects are social is that they are genetically uniform.

Continue reading “Bee shortage? What bee shortage?”

July 17, 2007July 18, 2007

Seed Regulation: How much is enough?

Earlier this year we posted about how EU Regulations destroy agricultural biodiversity and proposed rules to allow the marketing of European traditional varieties. Eliseu Bettencourt, a colleague with a close interest, said then that he didn’t have enough time to intervene in the discussion. Now, he says, he has a chance. Which would be kind of dull except that he’s seen the very latest drafts of the documents …

The post of 19th February 2007 refers to the “Draft Commission Directive establishing the specific conditions under which seed and propagating material of agricultural and vegetable species may be marketed in relation to the conservation in situ and the sustainable use of plant genetic resources through growing and marketing”, supposedly due to come into force on 1st April 2007. The Directive did indeed materialize as the writer of the post so rightly guessed then, though he even refrained from the obvious joke.

I guess the writer was referring to the draft document of May 2006, which bore that title. According to the drafts I have had access to later, in February 2007, that document was sub-divided intro three different documents, respectively: Continue reading “Seed Regulation: How much is enough?”

July 16, 2007September 30, 2007

Surveying diversity

The kind of survey where a researcher turns up at farmers’ houses and starts asking a lot of standard, rigid questions about the problems they have been having with their crops and livestock has been somewhat unfashionable of late. In fact, one of the reasons for the explosion of rapid rural appraisal (RRA) methodologies in the 1980s, followed by more participatory, often qualitative, methods (PRA) in the 1990s, was so-called “survey slavery: questionnaires surveys which took too long, misled, were wasteful, and were reported on, if at all, late.” ((See this note prepared for participants in a workshop on PRA.))

A way — in fact, a whole menu of ways — was found, as a result of the pioneering work of some NGOs and universities, of allowing people, even marginalized groups, to set the very agenda of research, as opposed to just answering a bunch of questions that researchers thought interesting.

But there is a place for well-designed, carefully tested and sensitively-administered surveys to document and analyze the ways farmers manage their resources — including their agrobiodiversity — and to provide a baseline against which to gauge the effectiveness of interventions or other possible changes. I want to talk about two recent papers that use farmer surveys to characterize farming systems, as examples of the kind of thing there might be more of in agricultural biodiversity work.

The first paper, on surveys of smallholder families in northern Pakistan, focuses on livestock production. ((Abdur Rahman, Alan J. Duncan, David W. Miller, Juergen Clemens, Pilar Frutos, Iain J. Gordon, Atiq-ur Rehman, Ataullah Baig, Farman Ali and Iain A. Wright. Livestock feed resources, production and management in the agro-pastoral system of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan region of Pakistan: The effect of accessibility. Agricultural Systems, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 5 July 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2007.05.003)) The surveys were done along two transects which contrasted markedly in their transport infrastructure. One of the things the researchers looked at was the percentage of cross-bred animals per household. They found that there was a higher proportion of such improved animals in the transect with well-developed transport links and more accessible markets than in the more isolated area. As the roads get better in this latter area, the researchers think that “the proportion of traditional, unimproved animals … is likely to diminish,” and there are also likely to be “changes in land use towards higher-value commodities such as potatoes.” An interesting conclusion about likely genetic erosion — in both crops and livestock — in the region. One could imagine using this kind of information to identify areas throughout the country which are at high risk of genetic erosion due to impending road building or improvement.

The second paper looked at the adoption of soil conservation practices in Kajado district, in the Rift Valley province of Kenya. ((Jane Kabubo-Mariara. Land conservation and tenure security in Kenya: Boserup’s hypothesis revisited. Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 9 July 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.06.007)) The researcher, Jane Kabubo-Mariara of the University of Nairobi, was particularly interested in whether population density and land tenure arrangements had an effect on the likelihood of farmers constructing soil bunds and terraces and planting trees. She found that as population pressure increases, there is a “significant shift towards increased individualization of tenure” and also a “higher probability of adoption of soil bunds and planting drought-resistant vegetation.” Now, that’s fascinating enough, but what caught my attention was the dog that didn’t bark. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to know whether farmers in high density areas grew more or fewer crops, and more or fewer varieties of each?

July 5, 2007July 16, 2007

Italian fruits and nuts

The latest issue of Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution (GRACE to the cognoscenti) has no less that three papers which use DNA markers to say interesting things about the agricultural biodiversity of Italy, my country of birth and (coincidentally) current abode. I want to talk briefly about two of these today — focusing on opposite ends of the peninsula — because they’re kind of unusual among molecular diversity studies in actually trying to answer a question, rather than just fingerprinting a load of stuff for the sheer thrill of it. In other words, they’re a little bit more than stamp-collecting. No offence to the philatelists among us.

In the first paper, Italian and American researchers wanted to know whether the “Sorrento” walnut variety is really always the “Sorrento” walnut variety. Sorrento is a beautiful little seaside town south of Naples, in the south of Italy. We used to go near there on our summer holidays when I was small. Walnuts are everywhere once you get up into the surrounding hills, and the local variety — or, better said, population or landrace, as it shows a lot of morphological variation — is one of the most famous in Italy. It is now widely planted, and the researchers compared two sets of trees, all commercially labelled as “Sorrento,” from areas 50 km apart: one around Sorrento itself, and one further north near Caserta.

It turned out that, although they looked roughly similar and were called the same thing, the walnuts from these two areas were genetically distinct. It seems that the farmers of the Sorrento region have carried out strong selection for particular yield and quality traits, but the original ancient stock still survives in Caserta. And some walnuts sold as “Sorrento” are probably nothing of the kind at all.

In the second study, conducted way up in the north, an Italo-Swiss team asked itself: what modern wine grape varieties are the descendants of Pliny’s famous “Raetica”? Caius Plinius Secundus (23-79 AD), better known as Pliny the Elder, says in his Naturalis Historiae that before Tiberius experimented with African wines, “Rhaetian” was considered one of the best tipples in the Empire. Rhaetia “comprised the districts occupied in modern times by eastern and central Switzerland (containing the Upper Rhine and Lake Constance), southern Bavaria and the upper Danube, Vorarlberg, the greater part of Tirol, and part of Lombardy.”

The researchers started with the observation that a Swiss cultivar known as “Reze” is very close to “Raetica” etymologically and comes from the right geographical area. They then searched molecular databases for its closest relatives, and came up with four varieties from Switzerland and northern Italy, again all from roughly the right place. Sorting out the possible relationships gets complicated, but it is unlikely that any of these are parental to “Reze”, and much more likely that they are siblings or offspring. Incidentally, one of these varieties — “Arvine Grande” — is no longer grown and is only available in genebanks.

So actually we are not much closer to answering the original question, because we can’t be sure about the “Raetica”/”Reze” connection. But, as they say, the journey is the destination. And for their next step on this journey back in time, the authors are now trying to extract DNA from ancient pips.

June 27, 2007March 1, 2012

The sweet smell of agricultural biodiversity

Readers of this blog probably share my belief that agricultural biodiversity (ABD) is critical to our future. Economists have come up with elaborate concepts and numbers to value it. Scare scenarios abound, about the potential failure of genetically narrow crops jeopardizing the world’s food supply. (Luckily they haven’t materialized, for the most part). Yet most people seem to be thoroughly indifferent to ABD, to judge from the general unawareness and the uniformity of our consumption, through which every single day we decide against ABD. I have therefore always believed that unless we can connect people emotionally and positively to the cause of agricultural biodiversity, its conservation and use will be a difficult sell.

Chanel 5 bottle One of the pillars of my belief has long been Chanel 5 perfume.

Isn’t it derived from the Chanel 5 tree, also called ylang ylang? Botanically known as Cananga odorata, ylang ylang is a widely cultivated tree with heavily fragrant flowers, originally from Asia. Those flowers have ensured its spread around the tropics. Here in Cali, Colombia, where I live, the tree is common, and releases its sweet scent to perfume the balmy tropical nights. What better example could there be that agricultural biodiversity not only ensures our survival, but adds glamour and excitement to our lives?

That pillar received a devastating blow when a well-meaning colleague recently pointed out to me that Chanel 5 is a blend of entirely synthetic aldehydes, and has been since its launch in 1921. It actually epitomizes the industry’s break from a natural to a synthetic perfume model. I should have investigated more thoroughly. Indeed, I have since learned that perfumes nowadays are overwhelmingly made from synthetic sources and not at all as natural as you might conclude from the vocabulary experts use to describe fragrances.

However, I must come to the defense of the industry. Internet marketers of Chanel 5 do not hide the importance of aldehydes in the Chanel 5 fragrance. The nomenclatural equation of perfume and tree, as far as I can see, is mostly to blame on websites such as this, which seem unfaithfully to copy one another. (There is an excellent monograph on Cananga odorata — and loads of other species — at Agroforestry.net, but it too erroneously states that the flowers are the basis for Chanel 5 perfume.)

Which leaves me puzzling: how did the tree get its name? Was it simply because its smell happens to resemble the perfume? Or was Coco Chanel inspired by the tree’s fragrance, and then realized that it was cheaper and more reliable to base its production on synthetic chemistry? I am also worried: Are consumers sophisticated enough to appreciate the greater complexity of natural fragrances? If so, they might start once again to demand perfumes made of natural ingredients (as they had to in the past, before synthetics changed the industry), thus providing income opportunities to poor tropical producers?

Anyone out there to educate me on this?