Category: Biotechnology

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Nixing agrobiodiversity?

Richard Jonasse at Food First did a reasonable job a few days ago of rehearsing the old WEMA vs LEISA (let’s call it) dichotomy in agricultural development. He’s done it before, and so have we, ((And as luck would have it, here’s another example, just out.)) and I won’t go on any more about that. But I did want to say something about one of his assertions. In talking about the policies of USAID and the Gates Foundation, Jonasse says:

What these policies do not do is directly end African hunger by strengthening Africa’s farmers where they stand. This point was underscored recently when, after the Gates Foundation donated $270m (with a promise of $1Bn over the next few years) to CGIAR, Gates’ representatives nixed CGIAR’s agricultural biodiversity mega-programme, saying it was “unfocussed.” This logic represents precisely what is wrong with the Gates/USAID approach. Only an “unfocussed” low-tech approach that honors biological and cultural diversity is likely to be successful in Africa.

Well, that may well be, but the SciDevNet piece to which he links to support that “unfocussed” comment by a “Gates’ representative” doesn’t do that at all. What “Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of agricultural policy and statistics at the Gates Foundation, told the Global Conference for Agricultural Research Development (GCARD) (28—31 March)” is that the megapgrogrammes, as then constituted, “[b]ecause they are so fuzzy … are not likely to generate enthusiasm for increased funding.” All the megaprogrammes, note, not just the agricultural biodiversity one. The agrobiodiversity megaprogramme was indeed “nixed,” but I can find no comment by a Gates Foundation rep on it, either for or against. And anyway, everything still seems to be up in the air on these megaprogrammes. You can follow the CGIAR’s change process on their website and blog.

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Nibbles: FAOSTAT, Drought, Seeds, Helianthus, Coffee trade, CePaCT, Figs, Old rice and new pigeonpea, Navajo tea, Cattle diversity, Diabetes, Art, Aurochs, Cocks

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Livestock genomes not enough

You may remember we nibbled a Science paper entitled Time to Tap Africa’s Livestock Genomes which got a lot of traction in the press a few weeks ago. It has also generated an interesting discussion at the DAD-Net forum, set off by the following contribution by Dr Ilse Köhler-Rollefson of the League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development, which she has kindly allowed us to reproduce here.

Congratulations on this article – it is certainly great to have these issues raised in a high profile scientific journal! However, after reading the summary about it presented in the BBC interview, I am a bit worried about the notion of the need to “tap Africa’s animal genetic resources” before they have become extinct. For one, they are already being “tapped” by African pastoralists — and have been tapped for hundreds or thousands of years — to enable survival in inhospitable areas. One crucial aspect of pastoralist livestock is the ability to walk for ever and thereby access and then ingest and metabolize vegetation that would otherwise be of no use to humans. Their contribution to food security is thus enormous. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, no scientific research has ever focused on “walkability.”

But what we urgently need to realise is that many of the wonderful characteristics of African and other pastoralist livestock are not a question of genetics, but of learned behaviour, as Saverio Kraetli has shown in his seminal studies of WoDaaBe cattle breeders in Niger. It is therefore a fallacy to believe that we can “fix” certain weaknesses of Western or high-performance breeds by introducing the genes of African livestock into them.

This does not make it less urgent to conserve pastoralist livestock, as food security for people in marginal areas remains a major concern. In their Biocultural Community Protocol, the Samburu have testified how replacement of the Red Massai sheep with Dorper has undermined their drought resistance.

African livestock breeds and their unique traits can only be conserved in living systems, using agroecosystem approaches as spelled out in one of the Strategic Priorities for Action of the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources. Consequently we need enabling policies for livestock keepers, much more than additional research at the genome level — which would be unable to address complex traits such as walkability.

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Peking presumably planning to plant potatoes

A short and barely comprehensible article in the People’s Daily Online alerts us to the fact that Beijing is to become a “seed-planting capital in the next few years,” on the back of its “currently reserved over 390,000 national-class germplasm resources, ranking second in the world.” Apart from what that means, I also wonder whether the planned planting programme will include potatoes, whose cultivation in China is apparently plagued by “inadequate germplasm resources for cultivar development, the lack of high quality seed potatoes” and various other problems.