- Round-up of stuff that’s been accumulating over past few days because we were busy putting food on the table.
- Marker assisted selection of tomatoes makes it to Washington Post. When will African crops do the same?
- “The history of humanity is a history of hunger.” Maybe MAS of African crops will help.
- USDA money for minor crops. Including African crops?
- Nigerian minister of agriculture on biofortification. Of African crops.
- African smallholders need to get together. They have nothing to lose but their chains. And their fake seeds. Which is not a problem for their Central American brethren.
- Someone mention Central America? Listen to a talk on maize diversity therein. And at the other end of the region’s diversity spectrum: oil palm.
- NASA wants to grown stuff in space. Organically, of course. African smallholders nonplussed.
- In space, nobody can hear you riot over food prices.
- Saving cacao from climate change: The colloquium. We’ve had cassava. Cherries next?
- Hold everything: there’s a framework for this business of crop diversity and climate change.
- Deconstructing strawberry flavour. Apples next? Not sure Indian farmers will care much.
- GBIF wants you to tell them how your data should be licensed. And some background.
- You can lobby the EU on fois gras. If that’s your thing.
- If you’re in Vancouver on May 6, you can celebrate five years of the Biodiversity Research: Integrative Training and Education (BRITE) Internship Program.
- You can also intern at Globefish, which links global fish-trade information networks comprising 85 countries.
- Great Great Lives podcast on Sir Hans Sloane, whose connections with agricultural biodiversity are multiple.
- Something else whose connections with agrobiodiversity are many, though this could have been highlighted more in the article in question: the Silk Road.
- What’s the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s connection to crop diversity?
Open source seeds are now for real. Again.
The Open Source Seeds Initiative is actually sending out seed as of this week, according to a press release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains … are being publicly released using a novel form of ownership agreement known as the Open Source Seed Pledge.
The pledge is far simpler than many of the alternatives that were being discussed as recently as last summer, when we spoke to Jack Kloppenburg, one of the OSSI’s founders.
“It’s almost like a haiku,” says Irwin Goldman a professor of horticulture at UW-Madison and plant breeder, who has released two of his carrot varieties under the OSSI. “It basically says these seeds are free to use in any way you want. They can’t be legally protected. Enjoy them.”
There’s a longer report at NPR.
A tale of two CGIAR centres’ media presence
It’s a bit of a cheat, but bear with me for a minute and have a look at a couple of quotes from recent articles in the mainstream media. The first one is from the NY Times. Don’t look at the original piece until you’ve read both quotes:
Drought-resistant X is now providing a better livelihood for some 20 million people. The organization aims to double that reach by the end of next year. The drought-tolerant varieties do as well as or better than traditional X when the rains are good, and when they are bad they will save a farmer from ruin.
And here’s something which came out in The Guardian the day before the previous piece:
The … drought-tolerant varieties developed by Y require a high amount of input of chemical fertiliser and pesticides that are not affordable by the majority of poor farmers. Methods like … organic farming are attractive because they are available and affordable and give a better net income.
Just your normal, fundamental disagreement about what works, and what doesn’t, in agricultural development? Well, maybe. But X in the first quote is CIMMYT’s maize in Africa, and Y in the second quote is IRRI’s rice in the Philippines, so there could be other things at work too. Maize is not rice. Africa is not Asia. And, just maybe, CIMMYT’s media relations are not IRRI’s.
That last possibility only really came to mind because of another recent piece, this one from USAID’s Frontlines newletter:
In partnership with international research institutes and with support from USAID, the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute developed flood- and saline-tolerant varieties of rice that produce higher yields. Rice plants grown using these improved seeds can survive between 12 and 14 days when completely submerged underwater, compared with traditional rice varieties that can only endure three or four days of submersion. For the most vulnerable country in the world to cyclones and sixth-most prone to flooding, these appear to be the perfect seeds to plant.
Now, when I read that, I assumed that one of those “international research institutes” must be IRRI, but that is not specified anywhere in the article. Discrete enquiries with people who should know revealed that IRRI’s Stress-Tolerant Rice for Africa and South Asia (STRASA) team was indeed closely involved in this work. STRASA has contributed directly to the release of 7 salt-tolerant varieties in Bangladesh and 4 submergence tolerant varieties (BR11-Sub1, Swarna-Sub1, Ciherang-Sub1 and IR64-Sub1), with additional breeding lines combining both traits in the pipeline.
Why would USAID not mention that? Why is IRRI’s message not getting across?
Brainfood: Wheat resistance, Wild barley regeneration, Barley improvement, Maize regeneration, Seed pathogens, Colombian rice management, Malawi diversity & nutrition, Modelling pollinators, Women & seeds, Vietnam development, European agrobiodiversity, CIP sweet potato goes to China, American NUS
- Gene bank of sources of spring wheat resistance to leaf-stem diseases. Crop wild relatives to the rescue.
- Evolutionary History of Wild Barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) Analyzed Using Multilocus Sequence Data and Paleodistribution Modeling. Recently collected material gives different results to genebank accessions, suggesting geneflow during ex situ maintenance?
- Barley genetic variation: implications for crop improvement. “Contemporary plant breeders now benefit from publicly available user-friendly databases providing genotypic and phenotypic information on large numbers of barley accessions.” Barley Genebank Database Heaven? Should talk to the guys above?
- Detection of genetic integrity of conserved maize (Zea mays L.) germplasm in genebanks using SNP markers. Oh crap, that problem with ex situ barley maintenance is an issue with maize as well.
- Incidence of Seed-Borne Mycoflora in Wheat and Rice Germplasm. Oh, I give up, genebanks are doomed.
- Ethnophytopathology: Rice Fields Free of Diseases, from the Culture of Producers in a Nuquí, Chocó-Colombia´s Community. Careful placement of fields in the landscape ensures they don’t get diseases. Who needs genebanks and breeders?
- Farm production diversity is associated with greater household dietary diversity in Malawi: Findings from nationally representative data. Yeah, but settle down, it’s kinda complicated.
- Landscape fragmentation and pollinator movement within agricultural environments: a modelling framework for exploring foraging and movement ecology. Don’t know how your set-asides and whatnots are going to affect pollinators? Well, now there’s a spatially explicit model for that. Which could perhaps be applied to…
- Complex effects of fragmentation on remnant woodland plant communities of a rapidly urbanizing biodiversity hotspot. Would be so interesting to know if there were any socioconomically useful plants (including crop wild relatives) among these remnants.
- Gender, Seeds and Biodiversity. Whether in Pennsylvania or Peru, it’s women that save seeds. (This is from an old book, which has presumably just been digitized, hence its appearance in my RSS feed.)
- Land Use Dynamics, Climate Change, and Food Security in Vietnam: A Global-to-local Modeling Approach. Agriculture is at risk. Better collect all that germplasm. Right? Right?
- Responses of plants, earthworms, spiders and bees to geographic location, agricultural management and surrounding landscape in European arable fields. Mineral N and pesticides not good for agricultural biodiversity. Too bad you can’t really conserve earthworms ex situ.
- Identification and evaluation of major quality characters of introduced sweet potato germplasm resources. 4 accessions out of 32 from CIP were likely to prove very useful, for different reasons. I’d say that was pretty good.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of underutilized crops in the Americas – A continental analysis. Some underused crops are more underused than others, but policies don’t help any of them much.
- And this week’s theme, I’ve just realized, somewhat belatedly, is the complementarity of ex situ and in situ conservation. No, really, go back and check. And it was purely by chance too.
Nibbles: Diverse diets, Ancient diets, Urban veggies, Medicinal phylogenetics, Double blind cowpeas, Adaptation hope, Livestock emissions, Climate change data, Afghani poppies, Aussie ag & breeders, Chinese agrobiodiversity, Weird cherry
- Meaty presentation on how biodiversity in the food system delivers a diverse diet. Could hardly fail to, really, could it.
- What’s a diverse diet ever done for me, asks ancient farmer.
- Vegetables an important part of diverse diets, of course. Especially in urban areas.
- Interesting EU project on the phylogenetics of medicinal plants. Any vegetables in there?
- Improved cowpeas only improved when farmers know they are improved. Wow.
- Some glimmers of hope on adaptation? Maybe.
- Not all livestock bad for climate change. And room for improvement on those that are.
- Yeah, but who cares, global warming is just a giant natural fluctuation, no? No.
- Legalize it, already! Poppy cultivation as a climate change adaptation measure?
- Australian agriculture unprepared for climate change? With all these fancy breeders and access to the world’s genebanks?
- Meanwhile, in China, the focus is on food sovereignty.
- And in Japan on its spaced out cherry tree.