Boffins to breed belch-less fodder. Al Gore unavailable for comment.
The geography of rice
Robert Hijmans has a great new global map of rice cultivation out. Robert is at IRRI now, hence his current preoccupation with rice, but he’s done the same thing for several other crops, and of course there are his cool cartograms too. I guess it is his map that underlies the figures of the potential impact of climate change.
Of course, this is a snapshot. How cultivation of a crop changes over time is difficult to capture in a single image, but there’s a map which does a pretty good job for maize.
Up a gum tree
Eucalypts decoded and hybridized.
Long-crowing chicken origins
You may have noticed a neat new feature on the blog. There’s a “Show on map” link after some of the latest postings which whisks you off to a pointer to the geographic location of the story. Jeremy will say a bit more about how he did it and why later on. I bring it up now because it was the reason why I stumbled on an interesting paper.
You remember that video of the long-crowing chicken from a few days back? Well, how do you geo-tag that? Where does the weird creature come from? The caption on MySapceTV says that it is a pure-bred Totenko cockerel. If you google that, one of the things you get pointed to is a DNA study that suggests that this and a couple of other long-crowers were bred on Okinawa from fighting cocks from southern China or Indochina. Want to see exactly where Okinawa is? Click below…
Nigerian President has rice initiative
I found a story in today’s Vanguard, a Nigerian news site, that could serve as a case study to illustrate the complexities of the interaction between conservation and use of plant genetic resources. Government imposes levy on rice imports, and launches a Presidential Initiative, no less, on Rice Production, Processing and Export. High-yielding varieties — including the famous NERICA — are multiplied and made available to farmers. A “rice value chain” linking farmers, parboilers, millers, traders etc. is facilitated. A project called Promoting Pro-Poor Opportunities in Commodity and Service Markets (PropCom) is launched, funded by Britain’s DFID, “a market-driven intervention programme that facilitates initiatives which enable the production of quality local rice in sufficient quantities that can compete with imported rice and benefit the poor stakeholders.”
I have two questions for the students who will no doubt be given this case study to ponder in years to come. Is all this good or bad for rice genetic diversity? And will it be good or bad for rice farmers in the long run?