- New NWFP Digest is out. Bamboo, bamboo and more bamboo. You all have subscribed, right?
- Your indigenous seeds will set you free. Not if you don’t have a breeding programme and decent seed companies they wont. Or not only.
- College students to evaluate hop varieties. What could possibly go wrong?
- “The IRRI is not involved in any projects on land acquisition for rice production, nor do we provide advice on land acquisition.”
- Agroforestry professor interviewed by Mongabay.
- Edwin Price vs Vandana Shiva on Borlaug on Oz radio. Let the games begin.
- Cool chimeric apple.
Nibbles: Légumes oubliés, Mazes, Poultry, Business, Roquefort, Herb, Evolution, Benin, Egyptian pigs, New York food, Cabbage pest control, Cider making
- Francophones! Watch this. Report back.
- Geographers! Play with this. Global collection of crop mazes.
- Chicken fanciers and development officers! Read this (pdf). Increase assets, income and nutrition.
- Agro-business! Respond to this. Please.
- Cheese lovers! Watch this. Salivate.
- Chemists! Find out why Teucrium tastes like apple. Or is it that apple tastes like Teucrium?
- Females! Why are you horny?
- Farmers! Get information to adapt to climate change.
- Egyptian pig cull! Bad. No, good. No, bad…
- Brooklynites! Wallow in ethnic cuisine.
- Africans! Why bother with cabbage when you have so many much more interesting leafy greens?
- Scrumpers! Get thee to Eden!
Istanbul on the Rhine
Good news for sun-loving Germans. By 2071-2080 parts of their country are going to have the climate that parts of Greece have now. That’s according to a paper in Plant Ecology which ran a bunch of climate change models for Europe. ((Bergmann, J., Pompe, S., Ohlemüller, R., Freiberg, M., Klotz, S., & Kühn, I. (2009). The Iberian Peninsula as a potential source for the plant species pool in Germany under projected climate change. Plant Ecology. DOI: 10.1007/s11258-009-9664-6.)) Have a look at the money map.
On the left are today’s Germany-like climates in Europe. On the right is where Germany’s future climates can be found right now. Germany will basically have the climate that France has now, but with significant bits of Spain, Italy, Greece and even Turkey thrown in.
Not surprisingly, the authors go on to suggest that this will have consequences for the country’s flora. They calculate that up to 1300 Spanish and Portuguese plant species not currently growing in Germany could find climatic conditions there to their liking by 2071 (edaphic conditions and the biotic environment are another thing, of course). That would be quite a significant northeasterly migration. It would be interesting to know how many crop wild relatives that might include. It would be even more interesting to know what will happen to individual crops, the olive and grape, for instance.
Today’s young Germans might be able to enjoy Mediterranean holidays at home by the time they retire, with the diet to match, zero-food-miles olive oil included. Who said climate change was going to be all bad?
“Conservation for a New Era” highlights crop wild relatives
As I just nibbled, IUCN’s book Conservation for a New Era is out. It
…outlines the critical issues facing us in the 21st century, developed from the results of last year’s World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
You can download the pdf. Agriculture has a chapter all to itself, starting on page 160. It’s nicely balanced, and worth reading in full.
If we hope to maintain global biodiversity and a reasonable balance between people and the rest of nature, then agriculture needs to be part of the conversation.
On the other hand, conservation has much to contribute to sustainable agriculture.
The high point for me was the stuff on crop wild relatives (and indeed livestock wild relatives), in particular their potential role in breeding for climate change adaptation. Genebanks are mentioned in passing, but the specific need for ex situ conservation in the context of a rapidly changing environment is not, alas, highlighted. Crop improvement is recognized as a key response to climate change, but perhaps the link to diversity is not as explicit as might have been warranted.
Effective responses to climate change will require changing varieties, modifying management of soils and water, and developing new strategies for pest management as species of wild pests, their natural predators, and their life-cycles alter in response to changing climates.
I liked the paragraph on the role of agrobiodiversity in plant protection, though it missed a trick in not mentioning the importance of the genetic diversity of the crops themselves. There is the expected reference to multi-storey agroforestry systems, but also less-expected mentions of perennial crops and underutilized crops. There’s sensible stuff on biofuels, too (though not much in the agriculture chapter, actually).
So, a step forward in the integration of agriculture and agrobiodiversity into the global conservation agenda? I think so, though it could have been a bigger one. At least agriculture seems not to be seen exclusively as The Enemy.
NGO deconstructs World Seed Conference
This is interesting. Robin Willoughby, Research Officer at Share the World’s Resources (STWR), “an NGO advocating for sustainable economics to end global poverty,” starts his piece in Counterpunch in pretty conventional NGO mode. I don’t know anything about STWR, but the rhetoric is familiar. Taking the recently-ended World Seed Conference and its perceived endorsement of “techno-fixes and monopoly control” as his starting point, Willoughby goes on to say that:
In order to protect biodiversity, adapt to climate change and promote food security, policy-makers must allow farmers to freely save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds in developing countries.
Right. However, he does then go off in an unusual direction.
On the ground, examples such as the Navdanya project in India illustrate the benefits of both storing and sharing seeds as well as the benefits in food security and genetic diversity by allowing open-access to plant genetic resources. Organisations in the global farmers’ movement La Via Campesina also point the way to an alternative agricultural paradigm based on cooperation and reciprocity. In the UK, the Millennium Seed Bank Project at Kew Gardens further illustrates the importance and possibility of the collection, research and development of seeds for the public good. Countries such as Venezuela are also establishing cross-border collaboration and sharing of knowledge on the breeding of plants based on cooperation and for mutual benefit.
What? So, not just sharing of farm-saved seeds to adapt to climate change, then, but “development of seeds” and “breeding of plants.” And genebanks involved in the whole thing. As I say, interesting. Or am I seeing things?