- Three Decades of Safeguarding and Promoting Use of Agricultural Biodiversity: Changing Global Perspectives, Paradigm Shifts and Implications. The priorities of Bioversity and the Japanese government have changed over time, but miraculously stayed reasonably well aligned.
- A focused ethnographic study on the role of health and sustainability in food choice decisions. Americans pick food items mainly on the basis of price, health, taste, and convenience. Environmental impact, not so much, alas.
- Wild relatives of potato may bolster its adaptation to new niches under future climate scenarios. Some wild potato species have unique climate adaptations that we’re going to need.
- Cold Hardiness Variation in Solanum jamesii and Solanum kurtzianum Tubers. Case in point.
- Assessment of Wild Solanum Species for Resistance to Phytophthora infestans (Mont.) de Bary in the Toluca Valley, Mexico. And not just climate adaptation.
- Screening South American potato landraces and potato wild relatives for novel sources of late blight resistance. Case in point.
- The pace of modern life, revisited. A big database on how the phenotypes of wild species like the above are changing, and why.
- Insights into the genetic diversity of an underutilized Indian legume, Vigna stipulacea (Lam.) Kuntz., using morphological traits and microsatellite markers. 94 accessions, 12 with promise for different traits, in 7 genetic groups. Let the really efficient breeding commence.
- Whole genome resequencing data enables a targeted SNP panel for conservation and aquaculture of Oreochromis cichlid fishes. The breeding has already commenced between different tilapias, but don’t worry, we can now tell species apart.
- A framework for defining livestock ecotypes based on ecological modelling and exploring genomic environmental adaptation: the example of Ethiopian village chicken. 25 populations, but only 12 ecotypes, based on 6 climate variables. Basically the same methodology as the wild potato paper above but applied to genetic groupings. Who will apply it to tilapias now, or indeed that “minor” Vigna?
- VarGoats project: a dataset of 1159 whole-genome sequences to dissect Capra hircus global diversity. Distinct African, Asian and European genetic groups. Well I never.
- Are Tree Seed Systems for Forest Landscape Restoration Fit for Purpose? An Analysis of Four Asian Countries. Take a wild guess. The key is apparently focusing less on planting lots of trees and more on making sure the resulting forests are resilient.
- Smart, Commodified and Encoded: Blockchain Technology for Environmental Sustainability and Nature Conservation. Not quite ready to help grow those resilient forests.
Nibbles: Seed saving edition
- Seed saving in The Guardian.
- Seed saving in Nigeria.
- More seed saving needed in Zimbabwe.
- Save seeds instead of growing GMO crops? The “debate” continues…
- Is seed saving among the best-bet government interventions to fix our diets? Find out.
- Seed saving on rsmag.com, whatever that is.
- Will the new Oxford nature recovery centre look into seed saving, I wonder?
- Saving baobab seeds in Burkina Faso.
- We need joined-up food system thinking. Starting with seed saving?
Nibbles: GenResBridge, Food for All, CIAT genebank, Seed for the Future, Vavilov book, Seeing Pastoralism, S Sudan floods, Sustainable diets, Elon Musk, CePaCT, NZ genebank, Wild potato, Peyote
- Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
- Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
- Meanwhile, in Cali…
- BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
- A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
- Exhibition on pastoralism.
- Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
- Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
- Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
- The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
- Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
- The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
- …and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.
Giving diversity a chance (reprise)
Taking the opportunity to cross-post this from Landscape News. Because, well, I can.
We at the Global Crop Diversity Trust work to make sure that food has a future. So imagine our excitement when we found that a recent edition of The Economist included a Technology Quarterly – and indeed an accompanying leader – on… the future of food.
The excitement didn’t last long, alas.
It turned out that the 2 October round-up dealt exclusively with new, experimental technologies like vertical farms and Impossible Burgers. To be fair, it did define the holy grail – or grails – of food system transformation in an interesting, and potentially useful, way: “…the quartet of healthy not harmful, natural not artificial, pure not processed, environmentally friendly not pernicious…” We could quibble about the meaning of “natural” and “pure” when it comes to something as fundamentally manufactured as food, but let that go for now. We think we know what the writer meant.
And the piece was certainly up-front and transparent about the choice of focusing on sexy, cutting-edge tech: “This report will survey an array of technologies being touted as ways of transforming the world’s food-production system not by doing old forms of agriculture in a less cruel and more sustainable way, but by doing things that have never been done before.”
It all does, however, raise an obvious question. What would be so wrong with looking into technologies that allow old forms of agriculture to be done in less cruel and more sustainable ways? Wouldn’t they likely be cheaper and more effective than, well, vertical farms and Impossible Burgers?
In particular, wouldn’t biodiverse farms in biodiverse landscapes tick all the boxes of healthy, natural, pure and environmentally-friendly? And be more interesting, and produce tastier food, to boot? The Economist itself seems to think so, if its review of Dan Saladino’s wonderful book, Eating to Extinction, is anything to go by.
We certainly think so. The Crop Trust’s mission is to help ensure the future of food by safeguarding the diversity of crops. That may sound a little New Age. And we do think that hugging trees can be a pretty good idea, though we should hug trees of as many different apple varieties as possible, and of the wild relatives of the apple too.
But we’re not Luddites. There are important technologies that could and should be developed and deployed in the pursuit of an agriculture, and indeed a food system, rooted in biodiversity. Using DNA markers to speed up crop breeding, better information systems, describing seeds and plants with drones and robots, and cryopreserving varieties in genebanks: these can all make important contributions to agricultural sustainability. And they are, in their own way, just as sexy as aquaponics and lab-grown meat. We’d love to talk to The Economist about them. Call us.
In the language that The Economist is perhaps most familiar with, when it comes to agriculture we should think less about economies of scale and more about economies of scope. Scale has fed us, but it has also got us into this mess. We think it’s time to give diversity a chance.
Nibbles: Oil palm, Diverse forestry, Financing biodiversity
- Parasites of oil palm monocultures as avatars of hope and justice.
- 30 ways to leave your monoculture.
- French take on investing in natural capital. Hopefully not oil palm monocultures though.