- Handy primer on the effects of climate change and biodiversity on food security, courtesy of the House of Lords.
- Crop wild relatives could help with all three.
- Trouble brewing for rice. House of Lords nodding wisely.
- The trouble that brewed for wheat wasn’t quite as advertised. Spoiler alert: the price spike had to do with China buying up all it could. So is rice next then?
- No trouble brewing for yams now that they’re getting sequenced.
- Nor for peanuts in the Gambia, for different reasons.
- Sounds like everything is hunky dory for the Tuscan grape too.
- Good to see SADC is on the job.
- It may be too late for some trees though.
Brainfood: Species mixtures double, Crop diversification, Local adaptation, Speed of adaptation, Essential Biodiversity Variables, Effective population size, Monitoring diversity
- Drought-exposure history increases complementarity between plant species in response to a subsequent drought. Repeated stress makes plant species get along better, sustaining diversity. If only it worked so well with people…
- A quantitative synthesis of soil microbial effects on plant species coexistence. Meta-analysis shows soil microbes work against plant species getting along better.
- Does crop diversification lead to climate-related resilience? Improving the theory through insights on practice. Crops getting along well together is pretty well linked to better livelihoods, but less strongly to increased resilience.
- Local Adaptation: Causal Agents of Selection and Adaptive Trait Divergence. You need to do reciprocal transplant experiments really well to find out where plants are best adapted and why. Probably means taking microbes into account.
- Genetic variance in fitness indicates rapid contemporary adaptive evolution in wild animals. Natural selection can be quicker than climate change. I hope they did the reciprocal transplant experiments really well.
- Global genetic diversity status and trends: towards a suite of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) for genetic composition. Genetic diversity, Genetic differentiation, Inbreeding, and Effective Population Size (Ne). Who needs reciprocal transplant experiments?
- On the feasibility of estimating contemporary effective population size (Ne) for genetic conservation and monitoring of forest trees. Ouch.
- Selecting species and populations for monitoring of genetic diversity. All of them, right?
Brainfood: Sweet potato in Polynesia, Land use in Jamaica, Himalayan Neolithic, Early modern Spanish ag, E Asian Neolithic double
- Sweet Potato on Rapa Nui: Insights from a Monographic Study of the Genus Ipomoea. Seeds could just maybe have got there by floating, but more likely sweet potato was introduced to Easter Island by people from other parts of Polynesia, perhaps not by the first arrivals though.
- The legacy of 1300 years of land use in Jamaica. European colonization led to deforestation. And no doubt the spread of sweet potato, but that’s another story. The constant is cassava.
- Prehistoric agricultural decision making in the western Himalayas: ecological and social variables. Large, socially diverse prehistoric sites had more diverse agriculture. At these high altitude anyway. The constant is barley.
- Early Austronesians Cultivated Rice and Millet Together: Tracing Taiwan’s First Neolithic Crops. That would be japonica rice and foxtail millet, which were brought to Taiwan from the SE coast of China.
- Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World’s Most Enduring Mega-State. Meanwhile, back in China, the adoption of agriculture drives state formation.
- A 16th-century biodiversity and crop inventory. 60 crop and livestock species, which doesn’t sound like enough. Alas, no sweet potato or rice, but some Setaria millet.
Brainfood: Convivial conservation, Resilient forests, Traditional industries, Wheat supplies, Food system transformation, Micronutrient security, Biotech promise, Ultra-processed food impacts, Sub-Saharan agriculture, Farmer risk management, Afro-Brazilian agriculture, Biodiversity funding
- Exploring Convivial Conservation in Theory and Practice: Possibilities and Challenges for a Transformative Approach to Biodiversity Conservation. Conservation should be integrative, democratic and redistributive. Hard row to hoe.
- Emerging signals of declining forest resilience under climate change. Convivially or not, better conserve forests quickly.
- Adapting traditional industries to national park management: A conceptual framework and insights from two Chinese cases. Integrative and redistributive, but I’m not sure how democratic.
- Near- to long-term measures to stabilize global wheat supplies and food security. There’s a bunch of stuff that we can do in the short term, but in the end we’re going to need diverse, gender-equitable agro-ecosystems which are properly supported by investment in research. Sort of integrative, democratic and redistributive then, perhaps?
- From food price crisis to an equitable food system. Looks like the food system needs to be as convivial as conservation. If not more so.
- Trade and dietary preferences can determine micronutrient security in the United Kingdom. Going to be difficult to take back control of micronutrient security.
- Turning promise into practice: Crop biotechnology for increasing genetic diversity and climate resilience. Maybe biotech needs to be more convivial too.
- A conceptual framework for understanding the environmental impacts of ultra-processed foods and implications for sustainable food systems. Nothing convivial about ultra-processed foods, alas.
- Why food insecurity persists in sub-Saharan Africa: A review of existing evidence. Exports, basically. Looks like exports are really not very convivial.
- Crops in crises: Shocks shape smallholders’ diversification in rural Ethiopia. Farmers need continual access to both the informal and formal seed systems to mitigate risk, but poor farmers need more money to do so. Maybe link them up to export markets? No, wait…
- Traditional Agriculture and Food Sovereignty: Quilombola Knowledge and Management of Food Crops. Lots of conviviality, but not enough to fully mitigate risk.
- The role of international cooperative initiatives in financing biodiversity. Partnerships between state and a variety of non-state actors may just be an opportunity for more convivial conservation and food systems. But then I would say that.
Nibbles: CGIAR impacts, Innovative varieties, Sweet potato in PNG, Mexican food viz, Mango diversity, Lactase persistence, Tree planting, Indigenous sea gardens
- Average returns on agricultural R&D investment is 100%, says CGIAR.
- I wonder how many from this list of the most innovative plant varieties of 2020 can trace back to some CGIAR product. Or genebank.
- Which sweet potato varieties do consumers actually like in PNG?
- Cool visualizations of the relationships between Mexican crops and foods.
- One village, 100 mangoes. Visualize that.
- Don’t blame high food prices on war. Entirely, anyway.
- Lactase persistence is not due to the benefits of drinking milk. Entirely, anyway.
- A whole bunch of tools to help select trees to plant in Europe. The entirely correct URL for the climate matching tool is this one though.
- Why worry about any of that when you can have sea gardens, though?