- Why the modern food system prizes uniformity even though resilience depends on diversity. Spoiler alert: follow the money.
- Historic crop varieties are finding renewed relevance as farmers contend with more volatile weather, emerging pests and changing markets. Let’s hope there’s money to conserve them.
- India’s traditional wheat varieties contain diversity that could help breeders develop crops better able to withstand heat and drought. Let’s hope there’s money to conserve them.
- India announces significant progress in conserving its wild rice genetic resources. Great that there was money to conserve them.
- Community seed banks across Kenya are calling for formal recognition and sustained support, arguing that locally managed collections strengthen seed sovereignty, preserve traditional varieties and help farming communities adapt to climate change. Yes, but are they enough without national genebanks?
- Researchers are racing to conserve wild coffee species whose genetic diversity may provide the resistance and resilience needed to secure tomorrow’s morning cup. Is the industry contributing, though ?
- New history of the macadamia traces its remarkable journey from Australia’s native forests to a global crop, while underscoring why conserving the remaining wild populations is essential for the crop’s long-term future.
- Researchers at the University of the South Pacific investigate how taro can withstand climate change, combining research with conservation to help protect one of the region’s most culturally and nutritionally important staple crops.
- Chester Zoo collects seeds from highly threatened cacti, because why not?
Nibbles: NSW genebank, Ghana genebank, Community seed bank standards, Kenya legislation, Valuing diversity, BBC on potato, Ube yams in Philippines, Strawberry anatomy and history
- Another genebank in Australia. Unclear how it relates to the existing ones.
- Ghana’s genebank in funding trouble.
- How to run a community seed bank, according to the Bureau of Indian Standards. Apparently includes things like its relationship with other genebanks and funding.
- How to change legislation in Kenya to be more supportive of genebanks.
- Why we need genebanks in the first place.
- Otherwise decent podcast on the potato manages not to mention genebanks.
- Otherwise decent article on ube (Dioscorea alata) manages not to mention genebanks.
- Otherwise excellent dissection of the strawberry manages not to mention genebanks.
Underselling breeding, and conservation
Crops with massive … importance, clear biological upside, and real demand for better genetics — but a system where breeding remains small, underfunded, and structurally difficult to scale.
What crops, you ask? “Opportunity crops,” perhaps? Fonio, say, or Bambara groundnut, or any number of African leafy vegetables.
Those would have been good guesses, but actually I cheated, so no. The word hidden by the ellipsis is actually “economic,” and the quote comes from a Reddit post on coffee breeding. 1
That of course makes the observation even more amazing. As the Reddit poster goes on to point out:
We’ve built a ~$100B global industry that depends on plant genetics… while seemingly allocating only a negligible fraction of that value to actually improving those genetics.
And, I would add, allocating an even more negligible fraction to conserving those genetics (despite the fact that there’s a pretty solid strategy for how to do that). Which goes for opportunity crops too, come to think of it.
Unchaining genebanks
Can the food processing industry contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity? Of course it can. Even in genebanks? Sure, why not. There’s no reason beyond a failure of the imagination to think that genebanks can’t participate directly in the food value chain as innovation partners, supporting sustainable products and market differentiation. Too bad there’s not a ton of examples. A pretty good one is NordGen’s partnerships with the food company Oatly. Oatly funded trials of more than 800 oat accessions, generating phenotypic and genomic data that identified traits valuable for taste and processing. The collaboration provided industry with suitable varieties while enriching NordGen’s documentation of its collection. This and a few — too few — other examples can be found in From seed to shelf: Models for integrating agrobiodiversity in food processing activities, from FAO and the Plant Treaty. I hope one day soon the coffee industry wakes up and smell the genebanks.
Nibbles: Genebanks in South Africa, Ethiopia, Cherokee Nation, China, India, The Netherlands…
- South Africa ratifies the Plant Treaty. Hope its genebank goes from strength to strength.
- Ethiopia ratified a long time ago, and its genebank is going strong.
- Wouldn’t it be nice if the Cherokee Nation could ratify the Plant Treaty?
- Want to build a community genebank like the Cherokee Nation’s? Here’s a resource.
- China hasn’t ratified, but that hasn’t stopped it building genebanks.
- And using their contents, presumably.
- India has ratified, and is also building genebanks.
- The Netherlands ratified long ago, but I’m not sure if it has a water lentil (duckweed) collection, or if it does whether it’s in the Plant Treaty’s Multilateral System. But maybe it will, and it will be, soon. I hope so.
- The Dutch also have an animal genebank, BTW.
- Watermelons are not in the Plant Treaty’s Multilateral System, but maybe they should be.
- Neither is Trigonella, though many other temperate legume forages are, so who knows.