- Why blogging has been light this week. And also, which resulted in this. Thirsty work …
- Which is why I love our new hosts (see above).
- There’s gotta be some of these around here.
- I know there’s a lot of these. And I have to say I prefer the beer.
- And as for the sort of things this guy made…
- I wonder how many crop wild relatives there are around here though.
- Or salmon.
- Ok, that’s all from here for now, but see you again soon.
Nibbles: Coffee, Farming origins, Trees and gender, Peach award
- Nice piece from NPR on the coffee genebank in Costa Rica and the importance of breeding for resistance to coffee rust. Where’s the diversity for that going to come from, you ask?
- Weird piece from NPR on why humans took up farming. Hard to swallow.
- At least in India and Uganda, men and women use trees differently, and have different access. Good to know.
- “David Byrne receives national 2013 Carroll R. Miller Award for peach research.” Settle down! Not that David Byrne.
Nibbles: Bamboo shoots, Cassava bread, Tomato reefer, Visionary scientists, Price volatility, Potato nutrition, Climate change & biodiversity
- After artichokes and asparagus, bamboo, obviously.
- And after bamboo? Cassava, by any of its many names.
- Botanical confusion: “Good tomatoes are a lot harder to get than good pot.” Not where I come from.
- The Union of Concerned Scientists is concerned about US agriculture.
- Per Pinstrup-Andersen is concerned about food price volatility, not high food prices.
- And Jeremy is concerned that he may not be eating enough potatoes.
- Luigi, for his part, is concerned about the two thirds of common plants that CIAT et al. say could lose 50% of their range by 2080.
Nibbles: SRI in Indonesia, SRI in Nepal, Diversity in GMO review, Climate change fears, Ancient grind in China
- System of Rice Intensification increases yields, not incomes, because it takes time away from other jobs. Caveats apply.
- Which does not deter Rajendra Uprety, an SRI activist, in Nepal, where rice farmers “hydridize technology”.
- In reviewing the global march of GMOs, a plea for policies to promote “much more crop diversity”. Well of course we agree.
- US food company executives fear “weather extremes” more than anything else in 2013.
- The same fears may have driven Chinese people to food processing 23,000 years ago. A grind not being able to access the PNAS paper.
Apple diversity trends: they are what they are
One of the nice things about being slow off the mark is that sometimes someone else will do the job for you. So it was with the splashy story in Mother Jones about the decline in apple diversity in supermarkets. Instead of having to point out some of the misleading hyperbole in that story, I can just point you to Alex Tabarrok, an economist with an interest in agriculture and diversity. Better yet, it offers me an opportunity to set Tabarrok himself straight. The view of diversity espoused by “the innovative Paul Heald and co-author Sussanah (sic) Chapman” that Tabarrok lauds is not one shared by many actual plant geneticists. You can talk about variety names, or allele combinations, or genetic distances, and get whatever answer you’re looking for; diversity is higher, lower or unchanged.
The geographical scale over which you measure diversity matters too, and Tabarrok explains that well:
Consider the simplest model (based on Krugman 1979). In this model there are two countries. In each country (or region), consumers have a preference for variety but there is a tradeoff between variety and cost, consumers want variety but since there are economies of scale – a firm’s unit costs fall as it produces more – more variety means higher prices. Preferences for variety push in the direction of more variety, economies of scale push in the direction of less. So suppose that without trade country 1 produces varieties A,B,C and country two produces varieties X,Y,Z. In every other respect the countries are identical so there are no traditional comparative advantage reasons for trade.
Nevertheless, if trade is possible it is welfare enhancing. With trade the scale of production can increase which reduces costs and prices. Notice, however, that something interesting happens. The number of world varieties will decrease even as the number of varieties available to each consumer increases. That is, with trade production will concentrate in say A,B,X,Y so each consumer has increased choice even as world variety declines.
I think something similar can be said of plant breeding. The number of parents in a popular variety’s pedigree may be higher today than it used to be, but the number of parents contributing to today’s popular varieties would, I reckon, be lower than it was, say, 50 years ago.
Looking at Krugman’s model of apple globalization from the Himalayas, an article in the Christian Science Monitor informs us that the first Red Delicious apples arrived their in 1916 in the care of Samuel Evans Stokes, a Quaker Missionary from Philadelphia. Stokes thought apples would flourish in the Shimla hills, and they did. But the climate that attracted Stokes and his apples has changed, and Indian orchardists are finding it hard to respond. Some are apparently giving up on Red Delicious and trying Fuji, Gala and other, newer varieties that may prove better (and happen to be favoured by global apple markets). Some are even switching away from apples.
So, is diversity increasing or decreasing? I’m not getting into that.