Nibbles: SOTW report, Food prices, Rex Bernardo, Odisha landraces, Cyprus community seedbank, Haiti seed producers, Trees for the Future, Iraq genebank, Sudan genebank, Climate-Conflict-Vulnerability Index, India SDG2,

  1. FAO explains why crop diversity matters.
  2. Well, for one thing, there’s food prices, that’s why.
  3. Ah, yes, crop diversity: “You gotta have it. You gotta use it. You gotta talk about it.”
  4. Odisha mainstreams landrace diversity in its seed system.
  5. Meanwhile, the Farmers Union of Cyprus is stashing seeds away in Community Bank of Cypriot Traditional Seeds.
  6. Looks a bit like the Groupements de Production Artisanale de Semences in Haiti. If you squint.
  7. If only there were some guidelines for managing such community seed banks.
  8. Iraqi Kurdistan gets in on the genebank act.
  9. Iraq used to have a genebank, but what happened to it has just happened in Sudan.
  10. Ah, to have a Climate—Conflict—Vulnerability Index so that such things could be predicted and steps taken.
  11. And a monitoring system and some targets would be good too.

Cock and bull stories of crop diversity

In his latest Eat This Newsletter, Jeremy deconstructs a paper on Tiggiano and Polignano heriloom carrots…

Culturally, each landrace is associated with a local patron saint, St Vitus in Polignano and St Ippazio in Tiggiano. Flavia Giordano notes that St Ippazio is “the protector of virility and male reproductive health, symbolically linked to the carrot’s elongated shape”. Which is odd, considering that all the commentary I’ve seen, including Flavia’s, agrees that Tiggiano carrots lose their turgidity very rapidly.

…and also points to an article about “the “Garlic Nerds” who are persuading garlic to reproduce sexually and then using the resulting seeds to develop new strains.” No word on the hairiness of said new strains.

Nibbles: COUSIN project, Breeding chat, Aardaker, Alternative beans, Grain amaranth, Iraqi seeds, Genebanks in peril

  1. The COUSIN project aims to conserve (trans situ, no less) and use crop wild relatives in Europe.
  2. That “use” part can be tough.
  3. But that doesn’t stop the fine people at Aardaia. At least where aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus) is concerned.
  4. From alternative potatoes in the Netherlands to alternative beans in Indonesia. All in the cause of diversification.
  5. No need to find an alternative to amaranth in the American SW. Not with devoted chefs on the job.
  6. The Iraqi Seed Collective is taking seeds from American genebanks to that country’s diaspora in the US, and eventually back to Iraq itself. Maybe chefs will help.
  7. Good thing there are genebank backups, eh?

Brainfood: EcoregionsTreeFinder, Microbe niches, Herbarium phenology, Green Status Index of Species Recovery, Feral pigs, Trade & biodiversity, African cereal self-sufficiency, Plant protection, Ugandan seed systems, Grasspea breeding, Indigenous knowledge

Rice, rich folks, and (small) reasons for hope

How much trouble is agriculture facing because of climate change?

There are lots of studies out there that seek to predict the effects of changes in rainfall or temperature on the yield of this or that crop, in this or that part of the world. There are even plenty of studies that look at what might happen to a whole bunch of crops on a global scale.

But they pretty much all have the drawback that they don’t take into account that farmers could in fact adapt, whether by changing crop or variety, or the way they manage their crops, for example through more irrigation. They may end up doing ok, at least with some crops in some places.

That’s a pretty big drawback, because it makes it difficult to prioritize.

But it’s also difficult to know what do about it. Farmers could potentially do a million different things, and even neighbouring farmers might do quite different things. How do you figure out what the effect on yields will be of all these things, everywhere?

A major global study in Nature has just tackled the problem by forgetting about the “what” and focusing on the “how much.” 1

The authors looked at the yields over time of six staple crops — cassava, maize, rice, sorghum, soyabeans and wheat, or two thirds of global calories — across 12,600 regions of the world. They then calculated how well farmers have actually been coping with increasing temperatures, irrespective of what specifically they are doing, and then projected that level of success into an even warmer future.

The findings are striking. Adaptation is happening, but just not enough. It can maybe alleviate 23% of global losses in 2050 and 34% at the end of the century; or 6% and 12%, respectively, for a moderate-emissions scenario. That’s worth having, but still leaves us with a mountain to climb. We’re going to have to keep breeding better crops, faster, and we’ll need the diversity in genebanks to do that.

I see two bright spots of hope in the gloom. One is that rice is predicted to do ok. And the other is that while the world’s poorest are as usual predicted to take a big hit, so are the world’s richest. Which might encourage them to actually do something about it.