Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
There’s a new online Sweetpotato Knowledge Portal. Lots of stuff on germaplasm conservation, breeding, seed systems, value addition etc. It really does look quite interesting, but, frustratingly, I have no idea who’s behind it. Institutionally, that is. There’s not a logo in sight anywhere. Seems to be driven by sweetpotato researchers themselves, many, but by no means all, at CIP. I shall be watching it closely, via its RSS feed.
Oh, pesky scientists! A bunch of them in Spain has taken a close look at one of the darlings of European tomato culture and found it, how shall we say, disappointing. ((Joan Casals, Laura Pascual, Joaquín Cañizares, Jaime Cebolla-Cornejo, Francesc Casañas, & Fernando Nuez (2011). The risks of success in quality vegetable markets: Possible genetic erosion in Marmande tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum L.) and consumer dissatisfaction Scientia Horticulturae DOI: 10.1016/j.scienta.2011.06.013)) The subject of their investigation was a type of tomato known as Marmande, associated with the town of that name. There are several landraces of Marmande tomatoes, and in northeast Spain two of them, Montserrat and Pera Girona, are grown in adjacent areas. Each has its favoured consumers, who argue that their Marmande is better than the others’, although both Montserrat and Pera Girona are apparently facing competition in their respective niches from upstart Marmande tomatoes from France, Italy and elsewhere in Spain.
The researchers note that:
Often without experimental confirmation, many consumers consider that everything “traditional” tastes better than improved varieties.
And they’re not going to stand for that. So, they went to growers and got samples of the two kinds of Marmande, a couple of controls from further afield, and some commercial varieties, grew them in the field and evaluated the hell out of them, including a slew of molecular tests. And here’s the bad news; while the controls and far-off Marmandes were quite distinct from one another and from Montserrat and Pera Girona on molecular data, those two could not be separated from one another, favoured consumers be damned. There were differences in the outward look of Montserrat and Pera Girona, but within each landrace the range of scores on sensory traits (what consumers are probably “preferring”) was far greater than any differences between the two.
There are differences, of course, mostly in what the two varieties look like. Montserrat has flattened fruit, while Pera Girona is pear-shaped. So, what’s going on? Farmers are clearly selecting to conform to the landrace stereotype, but not much else.
[T]he recent evolution of these tomato landraces has resulted in uniform fruit morphology and wide variation in texture, aroma, and taste. It seems farmers have selected seeds solely on the basis of fruit morphology, neglecting sensory traits. Texture, aroma, and taste do not correlate with the shape of the fruit; thus, the persistence of separate markets for these varieties is exclusively due to morphological differences in the fruit. It seems that consumers continue to identify certain morphologies with superior quality.
And this is by no means a unique phenomenon.
Selection for morphological traits while neglecting sensory traits seems to be practiced widely: variability in sensory attributes related to a genetic base has been reported in beans … and in eggplant. … In other cases, variability in sensory traits is related to cultivation practices, as in the RAF tomato, which can be acid, sweet, and crisp when cultivated in salty soils but of poor sensory value when cultivated in high yielding soils. As a result of cultivation expansion, the prestige of RAF tomatoes blossomed and wilted in a short time.
Inevitably, then, consumers are going to be disappointed by their chosen landrace at least some of the time. What’s to be done?
In order to consolidate the market, the link between organoleptic and morphological traits must be maintained and reinforced.
In other words, get back to basics: gather a group of keen consumers, identify what it is about each variety that attracts them, and then start selection to make sure that the tomatoes deliver more than appearance. As good as their word, the scientists have already done this for Pera Girona, and they say that just one round of selection has already “resulted in an improved inbred line”.
Ah, but is it still a traditional landrace?
Jacob van Etten has sent in this post, with the following disclaimer: I contributed one of the articles to the issue and participated in a preparatory workshop. My own addition to this issue highlights the role of ICT technologies to create new networks of collaboration around technological innovation, creating new links between scientists and farmers. Luigi will give his own critical assessment of that piece in a separate post.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the Milennium Villages Program and the new Feed the Future program are all busy to make a new Green Revolution happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. These initiatives promote similar combinations of better access to inputs such as fertilizers and improved varieties, including the development of input markets so that the inputs keep getting to the farms in the future, too.
The latest issue of the IDS Bulletin reports from the ground on these African Green Revolution initiatives. The issue contains interesting field studies from Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ghana. The focus is not that of traditional impact evaluation, though. The studies look at how the different projects take shape through an institutional, political lens. How are local alliances shaped to realize the objectives of these programs? And whose interests are being served anyway?
The stories that emerge are tremendously diverse and well worth reading. For instance, Kenya, with its strong but unevenly developed private seed sector, versus Ethiopia‘s still largely state-controlled system give very different contexts to work in. Especially fascinating is the study on Malawi. Malawi has been a poster child for its input subsidy programme. Blessings Chinsinga investigates how this plays out on the ground.
One of the lessons is that seed market development, as promoted by the different African Green Revolution initiatives, is supply-driven rather than demand-driven. For agrobiodiversity, this means that the supply often becomes reduced to a few modern varieties, even though there might be demand for a more diverse set of seeds.
There is very little evidence that the different projects were designed explicitly taking the political-economic diversity on the ground into account. As a consequence, the different interventions seem to do little to change local power balances or place agricultural innovation on a more democratic footing. Therefore, Ian Scoones and John Thompson, in the introductory article, call for more democratic deliberation on these issues, so that more diverse perspectives come to the table.
To me it seems that we need fairly radical new ways to make the voices of farmers heard and to prevent certain elites from undermining the process. Even supposedly democratic deliberations are often hijacked by elite opinions as a result of cultural conventions, verbal assertiveness and so on. Perhaps we should promote less a “talking” democracy and more a “doing” democracy. ((Paul Richards. 2009. How does participation work? Deliberation and performance in African food security. IDS Bulletin 38(5), 21-35.)) Democratic processes that tap into the expert knowledge of farmers may be less easy to hijack by non-experts, such as business elites. Vote with your seed.
What [breeders] say to me over and over again is no one’s ever asked me about flavor. No one asks me about flavor. They always ask me about yield and disease resistance… All we have to do is select for flavor.
That’s from an interview with Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, as reported on the Organic Seed Alliance blog. It seemed a bit overstated, so I posted the quote without further comment on PB Forum, hoping to elicit a response from the plant breeding community, and I was not disappointed. Here’s Nick Birch of the James Hutton Institute, Dundee:
At our institute (formerly SCRI), flavour and texture are key selection traits for soft fruit varieties (raspberries, blackcurrants, etc), alongside yield and pest/disease resistance traits.
Supermarkets in the U.K. generally select soft fruit varieties to sell mainly based on cosmetic traits, including flavour, colour, size, shape, texture and shelf life. However, environmental stress tolerance and pest/disease resistance are becoming more important as pesticide options get restricted via EU regulations.
And then came something from Bill Doley:
It seems that we’ve hit on the root of the problem here, the disconnect between the consumer and the farmer/producer, which might be worse in the US than most other places. With the long value chain between the plant breeder and the consumer, there can be myriad intermediaries producing seed, selling seed, producing the crop, and wholesaling, shipping and retailing the produce. Consumer feedback becomes a disappointing game of whisper down the lane.
Thus the booming popularity of “Fresh and Local” in the US, coupled with the resurgence of interest in so-called heirloom varieties. Now the consumers are meeting the farmers, providing the once lost opportunity to know more about the vegetables than simply the generic names provided in the supermarket produce section. They discuss their preferences and which varieties satisfy them, a very good start to solving the problem of tasteless commodity produce.
And finally Peter Glen Walley of the University of Warwick:
The breeding companies that I have spoken to or have worked with in the UK have breeding programmes that are heavily influenced by consumer preference (as directed by the supermarkets), be it general preference or the more selective niche markets. The global seed companies also use local preferences in markets around the world – selectively targeting their produce.
Flavour and texture have been a driving force in the tomato and leafy veg industries, with yield still a primary factor. I agree with Nick, consumer preference is still heavily influenced by cosmetic traits; indeed, much of our work at Warwick Crop Centre is now centred on how we can maintain this quality and yield as growth conditions begin to change through environmental stress.
So is Chef Barber hanging out with the wrong breeders? If he is, perhaps things are changing.