Category: Funding

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UK genebank still threatened

Perhaps because a general election in the United Kingdom is days away, the debate over the future of HRI Wellesbourne, which we noted here almost six months ago, is beginning to be heard above the din. ((And thanks to Colin Tudge for making it audible to me.)) HRI (Horticulture Research International) is one of the last surviving bits of UK horticultural research. It also houses the Genetic Resources Unit, the UK’s primary vegetable genebank. Warwick University, which owns and operates HRI, has plans to merge it with a Life Sciences division, possibly using the land more profitably to build a housing estate.

Much of the discussion is about the loss of jobs, the loss of expertise, the loss of competitiveness and so on. These are hugely important topics, on which I don’t feel qualified to comment. Then there is the apparent duplicity and callousness of management at Warwick University, which does have a reputation for its strength in “business”. On balance, though, it does seem to be just a bit short-sighted for governments to promote food security, exhort people to eat more nutritious food, and then stand by while one of the few places still able to deliver both is closed.

Personally, I’m not optimistic. Warwick prices everything, values nothing, and acts accordingly. But more idealistic people than me are beginning to stir.

Charlie Clutterbuck, who among his many other talents runs a successful website on sustainable food, has devoted several pages there to information about Wellesbourne, including links to a Petition and a Google Group, that is a huge repository of information.

It would be premature to judge either the election or what the winners will do about HRI. Horticulture Week, a trade paper, asked the key political contenders whether they would intervene to prevent the loss, and if so how. None of the replies is particularly edifying, but that’s hardly surprising. ((It’s the second question on the page.)) Governments of all stripes talk about the need for research to enhance food security, and some of HRI’s science may yet find a new home. However it currently looks as if the foundations of breeding, the genebank and the agricultural biodiversity it contains, are being allowed to decay. Maybe Luigi’s right.

Let it close, I say. Just transfer the contents to some place where its long term conservation and availability is guaranteed, then let it close.

All the politicos would have to do then would be to support long-term conservation somewhere else and take advantage of shared access to enjoy the benefits of someone else’s efforts.

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Nibbles: Consortium?, Sheep diversity, Sustainable biofuels, Agroforestry, Almonds, Chicken breeding, Restoration, More tree management, Vegetable gardening, Wheat domestication

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Not nibbles: on women, sweetness, reinventing the CGIAR, tomatoes and seed swaps

Notes from all over: In Vietnam, a woman working on the conservation of indigenous livestock breeds — Professor Le Thi Thuy — has won the 2009 Kovalepskaia Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. ILRI’s blog post on the award tells us more about Kovalepskaya (a pioneering Russian mathematician) than about Professor Thuy or the project she directs. But we’re here to tell you that pigs may be involved.

In Australia, a casual mention of sugarbag flies took me to a post about the Weipa mission in “North Queensland on the west side of Cape York, the pointy bit at the top”. There’s a lot more to this post than the heritage of honey and how to make good use of it; not as sustainably as you might imagine, in many cases. In any case, it is a great read.

In France, right now, and elsewhere at other times, the burning question on everyone’s lips: Are Gates and CGIAR a good mix for Africa? We’re not going to rehearse all the old arguments here — SciDev.net does that for us. But we might be even bolder and ask whether the new CGIAR will be a good idea not just for Africa but for the hungry everywhere. Maybe not …

In academe, an odd paper in Nature Genetics focuses on a single gene that can boost tomato yields by 60% or some. Sure, that’s not going to feed the world, but it might make ketchup supplies more secure. The press release casts the discovery as an explanation of heterosis, which seems like overegging the pudding, but perhaps that’s just me.

In the informal seed sector, two posts that illuminate a different way of spreading agricultural biodiversity. The Guardian (no, not that one, the one that “covers Prince Edward Island like the dew”) reports on a local meeting of Seeds of Diversity Canada. I wonder how many potato varieties there are on PEI. And over at Our Earth/Ourselves, Madronna Holden ruminates on How to feed the world. A big part of her answer: A Propagation Fair.

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Sesame: not an open and shut case

Lack of time sometimes casts an interesting item as a Nibble, so it is good to have time to draw attention to a FARM-Africa project in Tanzania. A recent post on the Farm Africa blog updates a sesame project. The chair of the Sesame Marketing Group in one of the target villages explains:

[E]ven though the community has been harvesting sesame for years one of the big problems they face every year is the size of the sesame crop. The villagers tend to use a mixed bag of seeds, which means that the plants grow at different rates. As a consequence they are unable to harvest a large crop, or to sell in bulk.

He hopes that by using the seeds provided by FARM-Africa the villagers are able to produce a larger crop and generate a profit.

Looking back at the overview of the sesame marketing project, there are clearly some very good things in it. Farmer Production Groups will be helped to learn more about sesame production, will get equipment to measure oil and moisture content, will be connected with markets and market information, will be trained to clean and store seeds effectively, and much more besides. But the key seems to be the distribution of improved sesame varieties, “giving them the chance to grow a larger, higher quality sesame crop”.

All extremely worthwhile, and I for one hope that the project is an enormous success. But I would feel even better about it if the project included banking the local unimproved “mixed bag” of seeds. There are ex situ sesame collections, and efforts have been made to whittle them down to core collections. Before FARM-Africa’s successes cause Tanzanian growers to give up on their old varieties, I’d like to be assured that they are already being conserved somewhere.

Instead of all which, had I been pressed for time, I would simply have written “Open Sesame”.

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A pioneering biologist almost discusses the keys to crop conservation

Because right now, still, the planet is blind. In other words I can step into the genebank of Brazil and understand it. But 99.9999 percent of the planet cannot. And so whether you’re eating in a restaurant in New York City, whether you’re a Nigerian farmer, or whether you’re a school kid walking to school in Arizona — it doesn’t matter. You are blind; you are illiterate. And this gives you the chance to be able to read. That will change our relationship to agrobiodiversity enormously. And I feel that’s the only chance for [combating] apathy. If people can “read” agrobiodiversity, they will then, for their own reasons, find it much more valuable to be interested in it, and as a consequence, [are] much more likely to be willing to save key pieces of it… And the only way that societies will be tolerant of big genebanks is if those big genebanks are offering them something. And if you’re blind to what’s in it, you’ve suddenly cut the list of what it can offer you down very severely…

The world has 1700 different crop genebanks. Every one of those things is someone’s salary, someone’s career, someone’s motivation. And they couldn’t care less about the whole thing. They care about the pieces in their backyard. And so the outcome is that you have 1700 collections which add up to x percent of the whole genepools. Well, if you ask me, I will tell you brutally that 50 percent of those will be dead and worthless in 50 years. But that doesn’t help the guy whose job it is to protect it, to raise money for it. He wants his income now. And the fact that it’s going to die 50 years from now couldn’t matter less…

I had to give a five-minute talk in California a few months ago, and I found myself saying, “Look, the threats are fragmentation, apathy, climate change, and small size.” Those are the threats. And the solutions are endowment, bigger size, and information systems…

Well, the legendary conservationist Daniel Janzen didn’t say these things. Not quite, anyway. But I didn’t change many words, and not by much. He was talking about protected areas, but it is quite amazing how similar are the problems of ex situ conservation of crop diversity. Too bad the two things are so often seen as antithetical.