- “See how beautiful you can make with small water!”
- IRRI redux.
- The problems of vegetable production in Africa, in microcosm.
- “This is a local production, storage and distribution system, a huge exhibit of biodiversity.’’
- PNAS special issue on ecosystem services.
- Bee books.
- Switch to switchgrass.
- More than you probably want to know about earthworms.
- Evil Fruit Lord questions Scotland-China raspberry deal.
- Ancient crop DNA recovered from underwater amphorae. Totally amazing.
- Nutritionist introduces soybeans to Afghanistan.
- Early PNG agricultural site added to UNESCO World Heritage list.
Nibbles: Funding, Grains, Wildflowers, AVRDC, Cloning, Salinity, Education, Sheep dogs, Swans, Writing, Fisheries, Big ag
- Silver lining: IRRI funding up 20% so far this year.
- Foodie discovers diversity: Amaranth, Himalayan Red Rice, Teff, Farro, Triticale, Sorghum … How have I never tried any of these?
- Texans save wildflower seeds.
- “We are not trying to use vegetables as a substitute for food, but rather as an addition to the food basket, to help farmers become better nourished and grow out of poverty.”
- Jurassic Park video.
- Olive varieties differ in response to irrigation with saline water.
- BBC’s One Planet podcast on urban agriculture in Kampala.
- St Kitts kids learn about sweet potato diversity. From the Taiwanese.
- Even in the struggle between shepherd and wolf the issue is uncertain.
- Agricultural biodiversity rituals corner: swan upping. Ah, swan terrine.
- A roundup of Britain’s nature writers. A sort of nature writer upping, I guess.
- Remember that catfish post a couple days back? This completes the trifecta.
- “…the crop from ground, washed, packed and stacked in supermarket-ready trays in just six minutes.”
Nibbles: Old maize, News, World Bank, Organic, Bees, Breeding, Svalbard, Genebank management, Cattle, Fibre
- Maize in the Dominican Republic 1500 years ago. Luigi comments: I see that and raise you wheat in Turkey 8,500 years ago.
- CTA announces news aggregator service. Yes, we feature. Via.
- World Bank country data mashed up with Google Maps. Not as useful as it might be.
- Organic farming researchers meet in Modena. Not all sweetness and light, though.
- BBC podcast on the troubles affecting bees.
- Breeders told to develop really hairy plants to combat warming.
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes list of world’s biggest science projects. No comment.
- CIP documents genebank use cases on youtube.
- The perils of herding zebu in Madagascar.
- Ancient Egyptians made cool ropes, but of what?
Genebanks examined
My heart skipped a beat when I saw the title of a new paper in PLOS Biology: Gene Banks Pay Big Dividends to Agriculture, the Environment, and Human Welfare. ((Gene Banks Pay Big Dividends to Agriculture, the Environment, and Human Welfare Johnson RC PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 6, e148 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060148)) At last, the numbers to persuade people that genebanks are worthwhile. It was not to be.
R.C. Johnson does a great job of setting out some of the history of genebanks, particularly the National Plant Germplasm System in the US, and gives some of the basics of how and why genebanks operate. He has some neat examples too.
Resistance to rhizomania, a disease of sugar beet, was dependent on a single gene. Breeders found new sources of resistance in samples collected in Turkey in 1952 and Denmark in 1985, and now those genes are enabling growers to stay one step ahead of the disease, which has broken through the original source of protection.
He talks about the protection of local and wild diversity too, in the context of wildfires in the American west. Downy (or drooping) brome (Bromus tectorum) is an invasive grass from Europe that has smothered local rangeland plants and contributes to more frequent and more severe wildfires. Seeds of native vegetation, kept in genebanks, are helping to restore damaged rangelands.
And for food security, Johnson talks about a joint effort between the NPGS and ICRISAT, to look for genes in wild chickpea that will confer resistance to pod-boring insects.
Heck, he even likes the idea of the Doomsday Seed Vault in Svalbard, using Ethiopian teff (Eragrostis tef), which was repatriated from the US after the Ethiopian genebank was ransacked during the civil war in the 1980s, as a good example of why safety duplicates are a good idea.
So what’s the problem? That there isn’t a solid economic justification for maintaining genebanks. Now as it happens, I don’t think one is needed. I’m persuaded. And I like the argument that Bonwit Koo, Philip Pardey and Brian Wright put forward in the conclusion of their book Saving Seeds: The Economics of Conserving Crop Genetic Resources Ex Situ in the Future Harvest Centres of the CGIAR. To paraphrase: although we cannot really calculate the benefits of conserving any particular accession, we do know that the benefits in general are really very large indeed, so why not go ahead and do the conservation anyway? Unfortunately, that argument has not really loosened the world’s purse strings all that much.
I don’t suppose one can really calculate the financial benefits of genebanks, and as I’ve said I don’t think one ought to have to, but I fear it will take another disaster before that message gets across; even then, memories are short.
Funding for international agricultural research
A long report in the New York Times details the precipitous decline in funds for international agricultural research. Money quote:
Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations roughly in half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion. The United States cut its support for agriculture in poor countries to $624 million from $2.3 billion in that period.
The story revolves around the brown plant hopper, a devastating pest of rice. Back in the 1980s, the International Rice Research Institute searched for, and found, resistance to the insect, which it bred into high-yielding varieties that were the basis of the Green Revolution. The hopper, of course, took this in its stride and evolved to defeat the resistance gene. It can now also withstand 100 times the dose of insecticide that used to kill it. IRRI says they have new sources of resistance, but cannot afford to breed those into new varieties.
One puzzle: the report says there are 14 centres supported by the CGIAR. There are 15. Or does the NYT know something we don’t?