Category: Breeding

Posted on

Climate change: Diversity the mother of invention?

Our man with the factor 30 sunscreen and the big umbrella writes:

Climate change is the new black. Everyone’s talking about, if you haven’t experienced it, well frankly you haven’t lived. We’ve heard this week that 39% of the world will have novel climates in 2100 (via Eco-Justice Blog). The concept of “novel” climates is a little abstract, but the authors of the study did a good job of bringing attention to the fact that new solutions are needed to adapt to climate change. It’s not always just a question of transferring existing technologies and practices. Without alienating the good people who invited me to write this, I’m afraid that for these areas conventional crop improvement of some of the hardiest crops is perhaps the most rational means of confronting this. (No alienation here: Ed.) Either that or give up on agriculture in these regions and intensify in the less affected regions.

But the study leaves 61% of climates where change is predicted, but to a climate already found currently on the earth. That’s a calming thought, as long as of course we have faith in the conventional climate models and hope the doomsday scenarios don’t come true. This opens up a world of opportunities for agricultural biodiversity, where an eternal optimist like me could even think something good might come of it. After all, adversity is the mother of invention. Perhaps the building blocks for agriculture adapted to the Brazilian cerrados will come from landraces used by farmers from the Sahel belt in Niger.

What do we need to do?

We need to get out of the abstract paradigm that we’ve constructed of ex situ collections, leading to crop breeding of blanket solutions, followed by a less than optimal delivery of new seed technologies. Farmers have exchanged seeds informally for millennia, and the rich diversity of landraces is testament to the fact that this works, especially in the face of change. We need to go back a hundred years, and direct all our 21st century advances in international diplomacy and treaties, communication technologies and truly use our ex situ collections to redeploy diversity and stimulate a diversification of agricultural systems.

Why? Well for starters studies point to climate change impacts being highly localized. To over-simplify, deploying a new seed technology across an entire region would result in improved adaptation for some, but a failure to capitalize on an opportunity for others. Of course, that’s the flip side of diversity: how to avoid sub-optimal use of diversity? How can we help a farmer to use the most adapted seed, maximizing the opportunity without being over-exposed to risk? Plenty of valid research questions.

Of course, we need to do a lot more and diversity is unfortunately not capable of confronting climate change alone. But I’m interested to hear ideas of how we might operationalise the redeployment of agrobiodiversity, especially in marginal areas.

From Andy Jarvis. If you have ideas, leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted on

Green Revolution 2.0

We’ve blogged before about reaction to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. A significant portion of the $150 million earmarked for the Alliance will go into improving crop varieties, using both conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. Two more takes on the whole thing came out today. Here, the great Ethiopian plant genetic resources conservationist Melaku Worede talks about what went wrong with the first Green Revolution, and what he fears will happen in Africa if the same thing is tried there. While here you can read about how high-placed politicians in Mozambique say the country is “striving toward a green revolution to improve and diversify agriculture and increase food production” and are putting their money where their mouths are.

P.S. Incidentally, the BBC World Service has a new series called “Feeding the World,” and the first programme is about the Green Revolution. You can download a podcast here.

Posted on

Child malnutrition in Uganda

Some clues in a newspaper article that is unfortunately not online led me to a East African Journal of Medicine paper on levels of malnutrition in a Ugandan village. The researchers found that “young children in Kabarole district suffer from severe chronic malnutrition rates, but rates and feeding patterns are not different in AIDS affected versus non AIDS affected homes.” This last finding may be because children also benefit from the attempts of care-givers to improve the nutrition of AIDS sufferers in the family. Here’s a key recommendation:

Poverty plays a key role in this situation, but there are cost-effective interventions locally available to reduce chronic malnutrition in children. It may require shifting food production to more nutritious foods and foods that are new for this area such as orange fleshed sweet potatoes with higher energy density and protein rich beans.

Sounds like a place where CIP’s VITAA Project could do some good.

Posted on

Leafy vegetables get cash

The diversity of leafy vegetables is being explored in a European-funded project that aims to make better use of existing germplasm. The project, worth 1.2 million euros, covers lettuce, spinach, chicory and “minor leafy vegetables” such as rocket and lamb’s lettuce. Almost 40% of the budget will be spent on characterizing and regenerating the roughly 12,000 accessions of the target leafy vegetables in European genebanks. A further 28% will go to evaluating the diversity and how it might be used to improve production. On that score, it is interesting that three of the 14 project participants are what one might call Agricultural biodiversity advocates: Arche Noah, Pro Specie Rara and Henry Doubleday Research Association. So I’m wondering whether any of the diversity that emerges from these investigations of genebank accessions will actually be registered on the EU Catalogue and of interest to those organisations’ members.

Posted on

Biodiversity still valuable for medicines

Nature is still supplying more than two-thirds of all “new chemical entities” that end up approved as drugs, according to the third in a long-term series of studies by David Newman and Gordon Cragg. Their scientific study of drugs introduced between 1981 and mid 2006 is online here. The study also reveals that 2004 saw the lowest number of new drugs introduced since 1981. According to New Scientist magazine, which reports on the study:

“The dip was due in part to the international Convention on Biodiversity rules covering exploitation of natural resources, says Danna Leaman of the World Conservation Union’s medicinal plant specialist group. She says that the Convention, signed in 1992, has increased the bureaucracy and cost of getting people into the field to collect plants for drug discovery.”

The scientists and reporters conclude that diversity is a vital and extremely valuable resource in the search for blockbuster drugs. And so it is.

My real problem with this whole approach is that it fails to disentangle agricultural biodiversity, and as a result countries think that their agricultural diversity is going to produce the same pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. But while drug companies may discover their billion-dollar blockbusters in plants (and occasionally animals) they don’t harvest them directly. They mimic and alter the drugs and find ways to make them under their control. Agriculture is not like that. Genetic resources find their way into new varieties and breeds, which are then commercialized. But the amounts involved are nothing like those in the pharmaceutical world, and yet that’s the backdrop against which people discuss agricultural bio-piracy. Here’s hoping that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture does indeed ease access and share benefits, as it is intended to do, and that the flow of genetic material starts up again in earnest.

While we’re on the subject of lumping all biodiversity together, another academic study has produced a biodiversity map of the world. While a press release and a report or two mention ecosystem services, they don’t tell us to what extent the scientists examined either agricultural species or the genetic diversity within those species. And I have not yet been able to get to the scientific study to find out.