- New Gene Conservation is out. Put out more flags.
- Biofuel from coffee grounds? Right. Hope the stuff was shade-grown, anyway.
- Is a lupin or date palm seed the oldest ever found? Let the controversy rage.
- Bees scare caterpillars as well as pollinating plants. Thankfully, Europe is on the job, colony-collapse-wise.
- Trouble for Scottish farmed salmon. And the wild ones may have their problems too. But aquaculture in general is booming, they say.
- Google Earth discovers forest. Not agrobiodiversity, but fun nonetheless.
- “It doesn’t just take in seeds – it sends them out.”
- Maize pest will love climate change. Well, some of them anyway.
- The latest review of earthworms discussed.
- Jellyfish and chips?
- Eating local pretty much unavoidable in Cuba. Yes, everyone wants to be a locavore these days.
- Japanese amateur botanists get into genebanking.
- “108 dishes based on jackfruit and seed varieties that are facing extinction were also exhibited at the festival.” 108?
- Queensland markets its tropical produce via a new website. No reason why others shouldn’t do the same, is there?
- “People shouldn’t underestimate how important a goat can be for a family in Africa.” Having had to assist in slaughtering one over Christmas, I certainly don’t.
- A rapid run-through the history of chocolate.
- Long-fallow agriculture in Mali leads to more, more diverse and taller trees.
- Global accessibility map published. Also one of fires, and intact forests. Let a thousand agrobiodiversity mash-ups bloom. Thanks, Andy.
- Nepal has lots of medicinal plants. Funny they don’t seem to feature in the Western Terai Landscape Complex Project.
Nibbles: Selection, Biofuels, Rice, Locavores, Sheep and Goats,
- Malawian farmers select their own sorghum.
- “Diverse landscapes are better: Policymakers urged to think broadly about biofuel crops.”
- “Reclaiming Land and Farmers for Rice Cultivation“.
- Local foods nourish local businesses.
- “Domestic animals here eat almost anything“.
Go forth and grow halophytes
That seems to be the plea Jelte Rozema and Timothy Flowers make in a Science paper that’s just out. ((It’s behind a paywall, but you can read other people’s take on it at Mongabay and Wired.)) But, frankly, I found the paper disappointing, not least because it is short on clear recommendations. For example, what is one to make of this?
Because salt resistance has already evolved in halophytes, domestication of these plants is an approach that should be considered. However, as occurred with traditional crops such as rice, wheat, corn, and potatoes, domestication of wild halophytic plant species is needed to convert them into viable crops with high yields. Such a process can begin by screening collections for the most productive genotypes.
Are they telling us that domestication of new species is a more profitable approach than trying to breed salinity-tolerance into existing crops? I think so, in which case it would be an interesting view, but I’m not altogether sure that’s in fact the point they’re making. It could have been better phrased. I mean those first two sentences could be summarized as
Domestication of halophytes should be considered. However, domestication of wild halophytes is needed.
Not sure how the editors at Science let that one by. There was also no explicit reference in the paper to the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture and its genebank. Or to the possible role of crop wild relatives in breeding for salinity tolerance. All around, an opportunity missed.
Neocolonial land grab?
Sue Branford writes in The Guardian that:
China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels.
A couple of days ago, Luigi mentioned in a footnote of a post on Malagasy coffee, that Daewoo is to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar. Apparently to produce maize. The Financial Times reported:
“It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar,” said Mr Hong [of Dawoo]. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.
There might be some scope for agricultural expansion on the Malagasy high plateau, but 1.3 million ha of good arable land that is untouched? Except by the local population, of course.
Not quite, and not so fast, responded the government:
The contract (…) concerns only the facilitation of a land search. We are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares … It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue.
Grain has a report, and a Google notebook with clippings.
FAO’s Jacques Diouf talks about neo-colonialism. There is also this Guardian article on resentment in Laos. Expect more of that to come.
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.