Category: Genebanks

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The Museum of the American Indian’s native crop garden

I spent last Saturday morning wondering around downtown Washington DC with a friend waiting for an afternoon flight. The day was bright and pleasant and we took in all the major sights. Including the National Museum of the American Indian, which is a pretty spectacular building on the Mall.

The Museum of the American Indian (photo courtesy of ReverendMungo under Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/andynelson/2159713642/)

Apparently, the construction of the museum was partially funded by a large donation from a wealthy Native American tribe in Connecticut, whose casinos are clearly quite lucrative. We didn’t have much time to spend inside, unfortunately, but the outside was interesting enough. And not just for the architecture of the building.

A Native American food garden has been planted along the pavement by the side of the building. You can see maize and squash here on the left.

And also tobacco, sunflower and cotton (below).

Further along the pavement there is a nice bit of prairie, with some particularly important medicinal and other useful plants highlighted. All with very informative labels. A really nice idea.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything about this on the museum’s website, so I don’t know whether it is a temporary exhibit or a permanent feature. Anyway, I wonder if the next donation by that Connecticut tribe might be to some of the genebanks which maintain Native American crop germplasm.

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The dismal science and dismal science writing

I was a bit flippant a few days ago about the costs of genebanks. And I felt guilty enough about it, especially after Jeremy’s recent piece at Vaviblog on the value of germplasm collections, to look into it a bit more.

It all started with an article in IITA’s R4D Review which looked at the costs of conserving the cowpea collection there. The bit I had trouble with was this:

Using 2008 as a reference year, US$358,143 and $28,217 was spent annually on the conservation and management of cowpea and wild Vigna. The capital cost took the major share of the costs, followed by quasi-fixed costs for scientific staff, nontechnical labor, and nonlabor supplies and consumables. Each accession cost about $72 for cowpea and only about half of that for wild Vigna.

Now, if you know that there are something like 15,000 cowpeas in IITA’s collection, and multiply that by $72, you can very quickly see that you don’t get $386,000, and you might just start to feel justified in losing confidence in the whole exercise.

So what’s going on? Well, what’s going on, when you look into the numbers, ((Which you can do here, a document you can download from the Crop Genebank Knowledge Base.)) is that the “per accession cost” of $72 was calculated by adding up the individual per accession costs incurred for a set of about a dozen different genebank activities (from acquisition to information management to distribution), and the numbers of accessions involved in each of these was quite different, ranging from 0 for acquisition to 15,000 for long-term storage. So, for example, 475 accessions were distributed at a per accession cost of $22; 2,360 germination tested at $6 a pop etc. Add up all of these per accession costs, as incurred in 2008, and you get $72, for a total of about $386,000.

So, I’m not sure if that $72 really has much of a meaning, but at least now you know how it was calculated. Which maybe the writer of the original piece should have explained.

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Taro resistant to leaf blight ready to go

Over at Pestnet, plant protection experts are wondering why taro varieties resistant to leaf blight are just sitting around in Pacific genebanks rather than making their way to Cameroon, where the disease has just been spotted.

I find it quite quite extraordinary that we cannot attract donor support to avert a food crisis in Cameroon. The varieties they need are already in PNG and Samoa –- the result of donor funded programmes. Other plant health issues like viruses have also been largely sorted –- again by donor funding. A lot of the material is sitting in tissue culture waiting to go. What is the sticking point to get some over there? What about Alocasia that became a staple in Samoa over the shortage there. That would probably be a quicker and more reliable option than plantain which as we know has enough of its own problems in Africa, including the resident black leaf streak which caused a food crisis in its own right when it arrived there. What is now needed to get it moving.

Is it intellectual property issues? Or just ignorance of the existence of these varieties?

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Nibbles: ABS, Climate change and crops, Beer proteome, Cattle SNPs, Nepal genebank, Sceletium tortuosum, CBD, Weeds, Vitamin A

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Pavlovsk is not alone

Over at Vaviblog, Jeremy has a post explaining why Pavlovsk is not unique. Alas, it’s because it’s by no means the only genebank that’s in trouble.

Wellesbourne and Brogdale, the UK’s national collections of vegetable and fruit diversity, have both been through the wringer lately. On October 1 Wellesbourne and the Genetic Resources Unit were officially absorbed into the new Crop Centre at Warwick University. The UK’s national vegetable collection is probably safe, for the time being, but the future of the breeding work that used to be carried out at Wellesbourne, and the many lines resulting from various crosses, is by no means clear. Brogdale too has been placed under new management, and parts of the collection duplicated at other sites where they may be safe, but it’s long-term future too is by no means assured. One could cite many other examples where national collections, built up and maintained thanks to government, are also subject to government’s budgetary whims.

We’ve blogged about the Wellesbourne situation before, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on developments. One hopes that the decision-making process will be a little more transparent than at Pavlovsk, and of course for a positive result in both cases.