- Rhizowen does DIY tissue culture to clean up his tubers. And fails. This time.
- Farming First endorses biofortified sorghum.
- Good fences make good farmers.
- Is intercropping banana and coffee worthwhile in Uganda? “It depends,” sez Jeremy.
The Genomics of Genebanks Workshop at PAG deconstructed
Greg Baute has a post up at his blog on the Genomics of Genebanks Workshop held last week at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference. Interesting observations on core collections, comparing past genebank collections to current diversity in the field, and the role of crop wild relatives in breeding. I particularly liked Cameron Peace’s advice on how to get the most from collections of wild relatives of fruit trees. Maybe we’ll hear more about that at Davis in March.
Genebanks and climate change adaptation
Gary Nabhan has had a letter published in the Christmas edition of The Economist.
SIR – Your otherwise excellent leader on adapting to climate change was marred by the assertion that people should abandon their “prejudice” against genetic engineering in order to secure food supplies (“How to live with climate change”, November 27th). Although it is true that drought-resistant seeds will be needed—as will low-chill fruit trees and root crops—they are not likely to come from genetic engineering. This is because it can cost up to $5m and take up to 15 years of R&D for each new patented biotech cultivar. It is unlikely that genetically engineered organisms can be deployed quickly enough to respond to climate change.
It would be far more cost-effective to support local farmers in their breeding and evaluation of selected varieties already in community seed banks. The diversity of heirloom seeds offers rural communities far more pragmatic options than the Gates Foundation and Monsanto can generate with all their wealth.
Gary Paul Nabhan
Professor, University of Arizona, TucsonCarol Thompson
Professor, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff
I won’t comment on the GMO angle, except to say that Gary’s point is debatable. What I wanted to point out is that it’s not just “community seed banks” that house the seeds of adaptation to climate change. ((As it were.)) National and, in particular, international genebanks will also be important. That’s because the climates experienced by rural communities in the future will increasingly come to resemble those experienced in the past by communities further and further away. Adaptation will lie in other people’s seeds.
Nibbles: Iron, Nepal, Livestock, Rats, Kew, Wheat, Carbon
- Iron-rich potatoes: from genebanks to “improving health in poor communities”.
- Agricultural intensification in Nepal; positive impacts vs “potential negative implications”. Via.
- Stray livestock wreak havoc in Sri Lanka. h/t CIAT.
- New book on “ecologically based rodent management”. Rodents say: “Rats!”
- Kew Director looks forward to 2011.
- More on North America’s wonderful wheat breeders and their ability to weather climate change.
- Plantations more profitable than pasture in Queensland — in a model that includes $4.4/tonne of carbon sequestration.
Climate change weirdness
Catching up is easy when other people too have been taking things easy. I missed this account of the possibly misplaced importance of maize in African life when it first appeared at the Climate Change Media Partnership in the wake of the Cancun meeting, but luckily a scraper site only got around to it yesterday. What is so interesting about this insistence that maize be Africa’s main staple is how ahistorical it is. Corn and Capitalism, Arturo Warman’s wonderful social history of maize, teases out the many factors that made maize Africa’s darling, often in the space of a couple of generations or less. But as Mclay Kanyangarara, climate change advisor for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, apparently told the side event at Cancun:
“[W]e have always had an option. … Maize is an introduced crop and the small grains have always been our traditional indigenous crops, which are better suited to our climate.”
Why, then, is it proving so hard to break maize’s stranglehold, a scant 500 years later?
And in other climate-change news, a cold winter comes as something of a surprise to the globe-trotting locavore in Guatemala. And another missed post that lives again thanks to a scraper offers first hand experience of climate change in Ethiopia.
“I remember misty mornings, with the sky full of clouds. Even ten years ago there would be regular rainfall six months of the year. This year we had only two and a half. We’ve had to reduce what we grow. No more peppers or vegetables – now it’s just the basics like corn and sorghum.”
Corn, again! The post goes on anecdotally to distinguish past weather patterns — an occasional bad year among the good — from today’s unremittingly bad years. It also talks a bit about how farmers are trying to diversify, for example by growing grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) instead of normal peas (Pisum sativum), noting that grass pea can cause paralysis.
“It’s a big worry for me,” says Lekea, a 50-year-old mother of nine children. “But the alternative is for us to go hungry.”
Another alternative would be for Lekea and other farmers in the area to trial some of the low-neurotoxin Lathyrus varieties that have been under development at ICARDA and elsewhere since the late 1990s. Maybe someone suggested that at the big “climate hearing” that Lekea was scheduled to address. Or maybe nobody in Ethiopia — including Oxfam’s blogger — knew anything about these varieties. That seems unlikely, given that Ethiopia has the varieties, which continue to be improved. So what’s the story?
There always are alternatives. Even to maize.