Category: Funding

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A shattered genebank slowly comes back to life

You may remember Typhoon Xangsane, which hit the Philippines in deadly fashion just over a year ago, on 28 September 2006.  It was given the Tagalog name Milenyo, or Millennium.

What you may not know is that one of the victims of Milenyo was the national genebank of the Philippines — the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory — which is housed by the Institute of Plant Breeding in Los Baños. ((The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is also in Los Baños, of course, but although some of its facilities were also affected by Milenyo, its genebank was not damaged.))

Some of the results of the typhoon can be seen in the photo essay published by GRAIN not long after the event. Some 70% of the national collection was declared lost and the rest taken next door to IRRI for emergency storage under “black box” conditions.

I visited the genebank last Friday, and the recovery has definitely made some progress, including as a result of some timely financial assistance by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. But there’s still some way to go: much of the collection is still at IRRI for safe keeping.

In this picture, Nestor, who works at the genebank, shows how high the water got on that fateful day. You can also see, closer to the ground, the mark left by the mud which flowed through the building.

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Continue reading “A shattered genebank slowly comes back to life”

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Practical policy research opportunity

Good news, everyone. There’s money available from a programme called BiodivERsA ((No comments, please, on the beauty, or otherwise, of that particular name.)) You have to come up with a proposal for an international research project to:

  • link scientific advancement to challenges in biodiversity policy and conservation management;
  • generate new knowledge and insights with the eventual goal of use in policy and management;
  • generate added value to national research projects across Europe by linking expertise and efforts across national teams.

Furthermore, it should have to do with biodiversity, and should link scientific advance to policy and practice. And it should include partners from other ERA-net countries. The online pre-proposal form will be available from next Monday, 10 December.

So you could, for example, decide to study the impact of european legislation on levels of agricultural biodiversity and then propose policy solutions that would increase the diversity farmers and others can easily make use of. But they’ll never fund you.

I wonder what they will fund.

Hat tip: Ecology and Policy.

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Free rice

From our friends at the Lubin Library, news of a way to have fun, gain bragging rights, and do good. Go to Free Rice and tell the web site what words mean. The web site says they’ll send rice to hungry people, 10 grains per word. I hope they do, because I’m a naive, trusting type of guy.

As for the bragging, I just donated 400 grains of rice, guessed “santori” correctly, have learned the true meaning of “demimonde,” which I have been misusing, and drew stumps at “chaffer.”

Go. Do better. Comment here.

Nothing to do with agrobiodiversity (mind you, they don’t say what kind of rice, or rices …) but some things are worth noting even so.

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Indian government to invest in herbs

The Government of India is apparently about to invest Rs 1,000 crore (which i think is Rs 10,000,000,000, something in excess of US$ 250 million, if I’ve got my decimal points right) in herbal medicines over the next five years. The article notes that:

It is a great irony in a country where households pass herbal remedies from one generation to another, and one village to the next, that India accounts for just about 2% of the global herbal drugs market, which is valued at about $63 billion (about Rs2.5 billion). More than 8,000 indigenous medicinal plant species can be found here, but just about 1,000 are commonly traded.

But there’s more. The scheme suggests that collecting medicinal plants will earn poor people more money than cultivating food. Will it earn them enough to buy the food they would have grown? There are plans to train people how best to harvest plants sustainably, and the article talks about a genebank, which sounds more like a database to me.

I have my doubts about the wisdom of massively centralised schemes such as this one, especially when, according to the article, the plan is to convert crop-lands to medicinal plants. Does India really have so much food available that it can afford to divert land from edible crops to medicinal plants, no matter how valuable those plants are? One cannot eat money, or medicinal plants.