Also at Yunnan Agricultural University I got a brief glimpse of some absolutely fascinating research from the Yuanyang rice terraces, which rival those of Banaue in age and extent. Professor Wang Yunyue, who just happens to be the wife of Professor Zhu, has been studying the agriculture of the Hani people who have cultivated the terraces for at least 1300 years. Modern hybrids have been introduced from time to time, but the Hani always abandon them after a couple of years, usually because they are no longer resistant to the diseases they were brought in to combat. Instead, the Hani continue to grow their traditional landraces.
Starch and human diversity
Human diversity and agricultural biodiversity interact. The variation that exists between and within crops and livestock products in nutritional content is to some extent matched by — and indeed there is evidence that in some cases it has driven — genetic variation between and within the human populations that make use of them. We’ve blogged about this with regard to lactose intolerance and predisposition to iron deficiency. Now comes a study ((Perry, George H. et al. (2007) Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nature Genetics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng2123.)) linking variation among human populations in the number of copies of the amylase gene with the amount of starch in their diet ((I learned about it via a post in Carl Zimmer’s blog The Loom, in which he also talks about a couple of other cases of multiple copies of a gene building up in a genome.))
Bigger not necessarily better in agrobiodiversity
Jeremy says we sound like a broken record on the lack of agricultural thinking in biodiversity circles at times, and he’s right of course. More charitably, it could be thought of as judicious use of a leitmotif. In which case another one would certainly be the unfortunate dearth of information on nutritional composition at the variety or accession level, certainly as compared to morphological and agronomic information. The reason for that is that genetic resources scientists and breeders have been more interested in things like yield and disease resistance. That’s had consequences.
Continue reading “Bigger not necessarily better in agrobiodiversity”
Atomic energy for agriculture
Make food not war: FAO head praises International Atomic Energy Agency.
Green Millennium Revolution Villages debated
I’ve blogged a few times before about the Millennium Villages. An initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University launched in 2004, the Millennium Villages project aims “to demonstrate how the eight Millennium Development Goals can be met in rural Africa within five years through community-led development.” ((“The Millennium Village effort is explicitly linked to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and addresses an integrated and scaled-up set of interventions covering food production, nutrition, education, health services, roads, energy, communications, water, sanitation, enterprise diversification and environmental management. This has never been done before.”))
Pedro Sanchez, director of the Millennium Villages Project, The Earth Institute at Columbia University debated the project, and also Africa’s proposed new Green Revolution (another frequent subject hereabouts), with the anthropologist Paul Richards of Wageningen University yesterday at the Development Studies Association Annual Conference. That’s going on at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK.
Would have been great to be there, and ask why it is that supporting the Millennium Villagers manage and enhance their agrobiodiversity doesn’t seem to be much on the agenda. But here’s the next best thing: a description of the encounter, one of a series of entries on the conference you’ll find at The Crossing, the blog of the STEPS Centre. ((“The Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS) Centre is a major new interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement hub combining development with science and technology studies. The STEPS Centre addresses two global challenges: linking environmental sustainability with better livelihoods and health; and making science and technology work to reduce poverty and increase social justice.”))
Here’s an intriguing snippet from the blog:
Richards says the Green Revolution induces spread of innovation by showing the seed system the “correct” pattern. But an alternative can be based on unsupervised learning that already takes place, he adds, whizzing through some very big and interesting ideas very quickly.
Kinda makes you wish you’d been there in person, doesn’t it?