Category: Funding

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Buffett sweet potato balls

Lets get this part out of the way: search Google for “Buffett sweet potato,” having seen an announcement at Papgren, and the number 3 link is for Buffett sweet potato balls. But that’s not what I was after.

I was after details of a US$3 million grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to enhance sweet potato for Africa. The project has two aims: to boost resistance to a couple of diseases — sweet potato feathery mottle virus and sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus — and to improve the nutritional content of sweet potatoes, most notably by increasing folate, iron and zinc.

Excellent. Africa needs higher yields and more nutritious diets. I don’t know what approach the Danforth will take, but as they’ve teamed up with the Monsanto company it is possible that there will be some direct manipulation of DNA involved. Again, excellent, because sweet potato is generally reproduced by taking clones — cuttings, actually, often called slips — from parent material, so farmers should be able to distribute any material they receive. But, I wonder, just how many different varieties will the project engineer? And isn’t there a risk that this effort, particularly if it is successful, will blanket Africa with a few genetically similar varieties that do not have the diversity to withstand the next disease epidemic, making that, when it comes, all the more disastrous?

Rhetorical questions, I know, and ones that I’ve asked before. The funny part is, nobody else seems to be asking them. That Google search, in news? Precisely two items, and one of those is essentially the press release. The other is kinda fun.

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Tropical Europe

It is easy to forget that Europe – at least political Europe, if not geographical Europe – includes some sub-tropical and tropical areas, ranging from the Azores to French Guyana. Now there’s a project which tries to bring some of these territories together “to identify common challenges” in biodiversity conservation and “tackle them in a coordinated way.” It is called NET-BIOME (NETworking tropical and subtropical Biodiversity research in OuterMost regions and territories of Europe in support of sustainable development). I know what you’re thinking: will it address agricultural biodiversity? Difficult to say from the information I’ve been able to find on it, but needless to say I for one think it should!

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Sustainable cacao conservation

Here’s a (relatively) new approach to sustainable genebank conservation, from Chocolate in Context: sponsor an accession. The International Cocoa Genebank in Trinidad will accept donations from US$20, which saves one tree for one year, to US$500, which saves a whole plot (no idea how many trees that is) for 10 years. And another web site, called Yachana Gourmet, preserves a tree on a farm, not in a genebank, and gives you access to tasty chocolate and other goodies.

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Green Revolution 2.0

We’ve blogged before about reaction to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. A significant portion of the $150 million earmarked for the Alliance will go into improving crop varieties, using both conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. Two more takes on the whole thing came out today. Here, the great Ethiopian plant genetic resources conservationist Melaku Worede talks about what went wrong with the first Green Revolution, and what he fears will happen in Africa if the same thing is tried there. While here you can read about how high-placed politicians in Mozambique say the country is “striving toward a green revolution to improve and diversify agriculture and increase food production” and are putting their money where their mouths are.

P.S. Incidentally, the BBC World Service has a new series called “Feeding the World,” and the first programme is about the Green Revolution. You can download a podcast here.

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Leafy vegetables get cash

The diversity of leafy vegetables is being explored in a European-funded project that aims to make better use of existing germplasm. The project, worth 1.2 million euros, covers lettuce, spinach, chicory and “minor leafy vegetables” such as rocket and lamb’s lettuce. Almost 40% of the budget will be spent on characterizing and regenerating the roughly 12,000 accessions of the target leafy vegetables in European genebanks. A further 28% will go to evaluating the diversity and how it might be used to improve production. On that score, it is interesting that three of the 14 project participants are what one might call Agricultural biodiversity advocates: Arche Noah, Pro Specie Rara and Henry Doubleday Research Association. So I’m wondering whether any of the diversity that emerges from these investigations of genebank accessions will actually be registered on the EU Catalogue and of interest to those organisations’ members.