- Dinka men despise manual labour, hence “southern Sudan might soon be on the block for having a lot of its potential farm land leased to, and worked by, foreigners”.
- Maasai, on the other hand, “diversifying into cropping, by keeping fewer and faster growing animals and … taking on paying jobs”. Takes all sorts.
- What is a small farm? Depends.
- Coffee contains insecticides. Who knew?
- Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) launched.
- Central America’s coffee lands to shrink under climate change, Reuters reports. Enough! I’ve got the shakes.
- Africa, meanwhile, needs technological innovations to cope.
- Domesticating baobab. You know it makes sense.
- Take two snacks in the morning and call me if you don’t feel any better.
- Climate change will affect Portuguese ex situ plant conservation sites too.
- “How best can communities conserve their medicinal plants?” A case study from China.
- Bolivia could make more of its Araceae and Bromeliaceae. Couldn’t we all?
- Are protected areas in Africa harbouring crop wild relatives? Just kidding: it’s invasives IUCN is talking about.
Nibbles: Potato chemistry, Millennium Seed Bank, Sacred sites, Japanese festivals
- Measuring micronutrients and stuff in potatoes.
- Kew wants you to adopt a seed, save a species. Easy as that.
- Maybe religion can do some good in the world after all? Allow me to be skeptical.
- Wait, can I change my mind? The wonderfulness that is Japanese penis festivals. Well, they mainly take place in the spring. Agrobiodiversity mainly grows in the spring. There is a connection, surely.
Nibbles: Medicinal plants, Nabhan, Wildlife
- Hang on, there’s a “revised and updated” Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. When did that happen?
- Gary Nabhan on following in Vavilov’s footsteps. You can hear him in person in Rome this Friday.
- Can you protect both agriculture and wildlife? Apparently so.
Crop genebanks in the Global Biodiversity Outlook
Seed banks play an important role in conserving the diversity of plant species and crop varieties for future generations. Among the most ambitious programmes for ex situ conservation are the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, initiated by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and its partners worldwide, which now includes nearly 2 billion seeds from 30,000 wild plant species, mainly from drylands; and the complementary Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which has been constructed in Norway, close to the Arctic Circle, to provide the ultimate safety net against accidental loss of agricultural diversity in traditional gene banks. The vault has capacity to conserve 4.5 million crop seed samples.
That’s from the section on genetic diversity from the CBD/UNEP Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, just out (pp 51-53 of a large pdf). And very welcome it is too.
Some of it is not particularly well done, but one is surprised to see it done at all. It would have been nice to have had more examples of genetic erosion than this estimate for rice in China, for example:
…the number of local rice varieties being cultivated has declined from 46,000 in the 1950s to slightly more than 1,000 in 2006.
And what does this mean exactly? Who cultivates wild relatives of rice?
In some 60 to 70 per cent of the areas where wild relatives of rice used to grow, it is either no longer found or the area devoted to its cultivation has been greatly reduced.
Probably something has been lost in translation. On the positive side of the conservation ledger, there is the assertion that:
For some 200 to 300 crops, it is estimated that over 70% of genetic diversity is already conserved in gene banks, meeting the target set under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.
This figure is much quoted, but I’ve never fully understood how it was arrived at.
Anyway, as I say, at least crop diversity and its ex situ conservation is in there. And the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture gets a mention. We should be grateful for that.
Nibbles: Meat, GMOs, Fungi, Africa, Aid, Artichon, IYB, Rare onion, Hummus, Fig
- Professor said meat should be properly priced to avoid disaster. Why just meat?
- “The Seed Makers Who Don’t Pray for Rain.” Slick, but do they actually pray for drought?
- Found the above here, but is GMO drought resistance really “very important stuff to making farming sustainable”?
- Kenyan farmers grow mushrooms. Fun, guys.
- Does Africa need better product branding?
- Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development. I confess, I didn’t understand most of it.
- Rhizowen invents the artichon. Who says there’s no new food to be discovered?
- Kew celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Pollinators get a look-in.
- Rome celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Agriculture prominent.
- IUCN celebrates Allium pskemense: edible, medicinal, a crop wild relative, and threatened.
- World record plate of hummus, 10,452 kg of tasty serotonin.
- Local man sends USDA a fig they didn’t have in their genebank.