Category: Featured

Peter Matthews asks some penetrating questions:

Farmers can feed people, but expecting farmers to feed rising populations indefinitely is like asking property companies to keep subdividing land for a rising world population. In both industries, limits exist. What can society do to reduce the demands made on farmers and farm land? And how can GM crops, land-races, and traditional seed varieties help us?

Is anyone willing to actually think about the answers?

Xavier sets Jeremy right on that carob-like fruit in Ecuador:

Must have been an Inga species (called guaba in Ecuador, not to be confused with guava, the English name for Psidium guajava, or guayaba (its Spanish equivalent). In English the species is referred to as pacay or, more attractive, ice-cream bean (I hope you had a chance to try it…)

Karl Haro von Mogel has a better way to revisit domestication:

I wanted to point out that for shattering, the mutant is likely to be recessive. If you stuck a mutant allele into a normal plant you would likely get a normal plant. So I think what would work better is to make an RNAi construct using the shattering gene as the template, that way it would silence the genes involved and be a dominant trait.

Eve Emshwiller agrees with Nigel:

Thank you, Nigel, for highlighting the critical need to integrate biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation and the question of how to do that. It does indeed seem that the McNeely and Mainka publication provides little more than continued lip service (although admittedly that is better than ignoring the issue altogether).

Peter Matthews makes a plea for ‘biocultural diversity’:

Wild species that are related to cultivated crops (and wild plant varieties that are taxonomically placed within cultivated species) do fall into a hole between disciplines, exactly as Nigel states. But not only are they and their habitats and ecological associations neglected, so are the past and present relationships between people and those wild species and varieties.

Matthew Cawood talks integration:

Agreed, focusing on “agrobiodiversity” without considering “biodiversity” is to make the modern mistake of putting these two topics into separate intellectual silos. They are ultimately the same thing.

Read all the comments on IUCN’s “Conservation for a New Era” book and how it dealt with agrobiodiversity.

Nigel makes a plea:

Given the sheer number of wild species that are related to crops and the need to conserve the full range of genetic diversity for future exploitation, it is just not feasible to focus entirely on ex situ CWR conservation alone, therefore the biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation communities will have to work together in the future.

Read his cri de coeur in full.