Category: Genebanks

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What is and is not going to happen with antimalarial trees

ICRAF’s project and publication on trees with antimalarial properties has made it into the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Kudos indeed. UnLike that article, fortunately, the ICRAF publication is not behind a paywall. The project has been much in the news, and rightly so, but at least one report is inaccurate in suggesting that ICRAF are planning a major effort on ex situ conservation of antimalarial trees. This is how The Star entitled its article when the book was launched: “ICRAF starts trees gene bank project in Nairobi.” And this was their lede:

A project to document genetic properties of more than 3,000 forest trees across the continent has started in Nairobi.

In fact, ICRAF already has a genebank, of about 200 species, and there are no plans to either expand that to 3000 species or specifically focus on collecting antimalarials in the future. According to our sources, The Star correspondent may simply have conflated the malaria book project with the results of a recent meeting at ICRAF on the State of the World’s Forest Genetic Resources.

LATER: My sincere apologies to The Lancet. That paper is NOT behind a paywall. You just need to register. Which takes a bit of time and effort but does not involve the exchange of currency. Sorry!

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Veggie genebank gets its seeds out

The University of California Davis (UC Davis) leads an international effort to help developing countries through improved marketing and production of high-value horticultural crops. Established by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Horticulture Collaborative Research Support Program (HortCRSP) supports projects to improve the livelihoods of the world’s poor and builds on their needs highlighted in the Global Horticulture Assessment.

Oh hum, right? Not so fast. One of the projects being supported is this:

Dr. Ricky Bates, Horticulture Department of Penn State University has received a one-year exploratory grant from HortCRSP to look at methodologies for strengthening informal indigenous seed systems in Northern Thailand and Cambodia.

And it gets better. A genebank is involved. My cup runneth over.

The ECHO seed bank partnership is a very important integral part of this project. Dr. Bates states that, “ECHO has been around for awhile. ECHO is located in Ft. Myers Florida and has been around for at least 20 years. They see themselves more or less as an extension service where they are there to resource and support NGOs and people working all around the world with poor farmers. It is a little like an extension system where they provide information and printed material via online or telephone calls to people who may find themselves perhaps in India with World Vision. ECHO is there as a resource for NGOs that do not have an agricultural background. What grew up with the development of ECHO has been the development of a vey innovative seed bank in Ft. Myers Florida where they sort of specialize in tropical fruits and vegetables. They make these seeds available at low cost or no cost to individuals and NGOs working around the globe in development.

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Safeguarding tangible agricultural heritage

There’s a great set of pictures of Kenyan traditional crops and food preparation on UNESCO’s Facebook page, in their Documenting Living Heritage series. This is part of an exhibition currently on at UNESCO’s HQ in Paris to raise awareness of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. I doubt there’s a photograph of the Gene Bank of Kenya, but that surely contributes to that goal too.

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German lentils go back home

Before the introduction of the potato, Irish people included grain as a dietary mainstay, particularly oats. Oats were used in breads, desserts, drinks, medicines and cosmetics! Other grains that were grown included barley, flax, rye and some wheats. Unfortunately, many of these grain varieties were lost and we had to turn, primarily to the Vavilov Institute in Russia, the first genebank in the world, to repatriate our native grains. Michael Miklis in Piltown, Kilkenny, working with very small quantities of grain, over many years trialed them and bulked them up so that they could be resown on field scale again.

That reference to the Vavilov Institute on the Irish Seed Savers website reminded me of something similar they told me about the last time I was there.

Dr Margarita Vishnyaova, the head of the legume department, told me that they had recently “repatriated” some “German” lentils to a farmer cooperative in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The varieties in question are labelled “Späts Alpenlinse” (K2106, collected Hungary in 1965) and “Späths Albinse” (K2076, collected Czechoslovakia in 1963) in VIR’s records. Woldemar Mammel, a farmer from near Stuttgart had apparently been looking for these varieties in databases all over the place and eventually happened on them in the VIR online catalogue. They are old traditional varieties from the Swabian Alps which are no longer grown in Germany, or at least his part of them. The handover of the seed to Herr Mammel and a group of 15 other German organic farmers took place in Nov. 2007 at VIR, and was filmed by Slow Food Deutschland (Prof. Dr Roman Lenz, Dinah Epperlein). There are some photographs of the event on the Slow Food website. Sometimes genebank databases are good for something after all.