- The banana in the Pacific. Including those orange ones…
- Swapping seeds at Kew. A genebank reaches out.
- Gosh is that all today? Looks like it. You guys out there have anything?
- No, wait, here’s something else. Huge cassava conference coming up, with its biodiversity on the agenda. These guys will probably be there.
Make mine an MLS decaff
There was a nice article recently in Nature reviewing the struggle — and it’s been a mighty struggle, which is still going on — to breed a naturally low-caffeine coffee plant. It’s worth reading in full, if you can get hold of it, but I just want to focus briefly here on this paragraph:
In 2000, Mazzafera teamed up with Silvarolla, a coffee breeder at the IAC. They shifted their focus to a group of C. arabica plants originally collected during a 1964 United Nations expedition to Eritrea and Ethiopia. Seed samples — 620 in total — were divided up and grown in several countries, including Costa Rica. Later, 308 of these lineages were collected in Costa Rica and sent to Brazil. Mazzafera believed it would be much easier to produce marketable coffee by starting with the Ethiopian C. arabica plants than by hybridizing with other species.
What’s interesting about this is that the ORSTOM (now France’s IRD), FAO and IBPGR collections made in the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1964 one alluded to above, still form the bulk of the material maintained in coffee genebanks around the world. Sure, there’s been more collecting in Ethiopia since then, but that material is much more difficult for breeders outside that country to get hold of than the results of these older international collecting initiatives.
That’s at least partly because Coffea is not among the crops which are supposed to be liable to facilitated access under the multilateral system of access and benefit sharing (MLS) being put in place by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
Ah, but wait. That reference to Costa Rica in the paragraph above really means CATIE, or the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Turrialba. And that institute has put all its collections under Article 15 of the Treaty. Yes, including coffee.
If the world is to have its naturally decaffeinated cappuccinos, a good first step might be to put in place a multilateral system for coffee too, which goes beyond the CATIE collection. That would surely help get breeders using as wide a range of diversity as possible. Or at least as is available in existing collections. That these are far from complete, especially as regards wild relatives, is well understood. But that’s something for another post.
Cassava varieties in Ghana
Call me old-fashioned, but I have a soft spot for this kind of poster. This particular example was at CSIR’s Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Bunso, Ghana. Beats an SSR dendrogram thingie any time.
Nibbles: Small farmers, Wild bananas, Titan arum, Fish for diversity, Tenure, Treaty, Australian genebank, Mexican genebank, Mexican drought, Potato record, Khat and fodder in Ethiopia
- On my signal, unleash the potential of small farmers and food producers worldwide. Has a return ring to it.
- More than anyone could reasonably want to know about wild banana relatives in Thailand.
- Big stinky flower with its own webcam. Must be a wild relative of something.
- Better in many ways to catch a diversity of fish species than to focus on one.
- Could probably do with some guidelines for access to fisheries, though, right?
- International Seed Treaty secretariat knocks ‘em dead down under. “THREE-quarters of the world’s crop biodiversity has been irrevocably lost since 1900.”
- Of course it has. Did Dr Bhatti visit this place during his tour of Oz, I wonder? If not, maybe he’ll visit Mexico next and see this place. And speaking of Mexico…
- Mexico sneezes, US grain exports catch a cold?
- World record potato harvest in Bihar; there’s a lot that’s fishy about this story.
- “Khat cultivation in Ethiopia fuels economy, reduces deforestation.” And makes people sick, but who’s counting.
- Ah but here’s a possible alternative. Now, if only CIFOR and ILRI would talk together about this.
Nibbles: Treaty in Malaysia, Vavilov in Sardinia, Vegetative crops, Aquaculture, Indian AnGR, Seed Savers, Ancient Egypt and thereabouts, Quinoa in Chile
- Michael Halewood in Genebank Policy Hell.
- Vavilov in Genebank Database Hell.
- A guide through Clonal Crops Conservation Hell.
- Pakistan contemplates genebank for carp “pure line and improved stairs for SAARC countries.” Bicycles next, I suppose. But will Ghana follow suit?
- Meanwhile across the border, India is putting resources into livestock conservation at both national and state level.
- Italian broccoli variety moves to Florida and makes the big time.
- And ancient Egyptian gardens make the big time in Amsterdam. Too bad it wont be possible to exchange seeds.
- I bet those ancient Egyptians had taro. They certainly had wheat and barley.
- But not quinoa, alas, despite what Thor Heyerdahl might have thought.