- Gardening is good for you. It’s official. And they didn’t even measure nutrition.
- European seed swap in Brussels.
- More fun for mappers; Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication. h/t CAPRi
- Australian animal genebank under threat.
- Filipinos ♥ IRRI.
- Big write up of Seed Treaty‘s recent Governing Body meeting in Bali.
- Wired magazine goes nuts for bananas and other fruits as sources of better plastics.
- Camelicious! The worlds first large-scale camel dairy farm.
- Food strikes in ancient Egypt. They’ve been revolting for more than 3000 years.
- Nice round-up of how indigenous communities in Colombia are protecting their food security.
The way things were
Mr El-Sayed Mohamed El-Azazi, Executive Director of the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank, has posted a comment to one of our previous posts about the looting of his genebank. It includes a link the following presentation on what the place looked like before the fateful day. The call has gone out for help replacing lost equipment. One can only hope it will be heeded.
Nibbles: Policy, Nutrition, Education, Svalbard, Plagues
- Looks interesting: Assessing the impact of rural policy on biodiversity: High Nature Value Farming in Italy. Next Thursday.
- Gates Foundation’s Sylvia Mathews Burwell says Fortify Lives with agriculture and Nutrition. In full.
- Ugandans! Grow sorghum, get a scholarship for your child. Win-win. Cheers, Nile Breweries.
- Australian farmer tells all about Svalbard.
- ILRI speaks about climate change, livestock and plagues — The Economist listens. Respect!
An overlooked global public good
Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, is asking
donors to move away from the model of subsisidised fertilisers and seeds – which he calls “private goods”, to supporting “public goods” such as better infrastructure, strengthening local markets, ensuring access to credit and building storage capabilities.
Alas, I don’t think “storage capabilities” refers to genebanks here. No word on whether Prof. de Schutter would in fact include international crop germplasm collections in that list, but the World Bank certainly does.…
Australia and Russian Federation shoulder to shoulder over genebanks
We pointed out recently that the threat to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station’s field genebanks is not, in fact, as unique as it might seem. From Science magazine comes news that “Australia’s seed banks are tumbling like dominoes”. The report details the gradual loss of Australia’s six genebanks.
[I]n mid-2008 a bank in Adelaide holding Mediterranean forages such as alfalfa closed its doors; of its 45,000 accessions, 95% are held nowhere else in the world.
Where have we heard claims like that before?
Part of the article that I don’t understand concerns Australia’s obligations under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Is there really a mechanism to prevent free-riders, as the article suggests? If Australia cannot supply seeds from its own genebanks, because those seeds are dead, or no longer exist, will they really be blocked access to other genebanks’ accessions?
The article ends by echoing what is really the crucial point for all genebanks:
Seed banks “need long-term support that is outside grant or research support,” says Megan Clarke, chief executive of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and the country’s main supporter of agricultural research.
That is clearly as true in Australia as it is in Russia. And the Australians aren’t even planning to build houses where the genebanks were.