Nibbles: Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk, Fun fungus, ALVs, Breadfruit
- Best round up yet of what’s happening at Pavlovsk Experiment Station.
- Nature’s report on Pavlovsk is good too.
- Pavlovsk making waves in India too. S.Ananthanarayanan shares a write-up in The Statesman, Kolkata.
- More on that Chinese insect-eating fungus, or Chinese Love Flower. Yuck.
- A one-woman crusade for traditional African leafy vegetables. Right.
- Breadfruit trees in Jamaica. From the Trees that Feed Foundation, a new one on me.
Nibbles: Bent, Rice, Cheez, Pavlovsk, Millennium Seed Bank, Livestock, EUCARPIA
- Fine memoir of Sir Bent Skovmand. Thanks Dag.
- Rice yields falling — and not just in experimental stations. The paper.
- In all the eulogies to the inventor of the Cheez Doodle, a note of truth.
- You could buy the Pavlovsk genebank site for just USD3.3 million, it says here. Is that even doable?
- Meanwhile, over in England, Researchers Rush to Fill Noah’s Ark Seed Bank While Politicians Bicker.
- Meanwhile, in Australia, worries about declines in livestock diversity.
- EUCARPIA’s meetings calendar. Handy.
Pavlovsk becomes myth
The pack is well and truly on the scent now, with The Guardian in London and ABC in Australia weighing in, to say nothing of assorted ad-farms and feed scrapers. As they do so, strange claims are being made.
That Pavlovsk is “the world’s first global seed bank,” for example. It isn’t. But that does not diminish its importance of the Russian state’s short-sightenedness one bit.
And that “[t]welve Russian scientists starved to death at the site while protecting the crops”. They didn’t. They starved to death at the VIR’s headquarters in Leningrad proper.
Nits being picked, I agree, just as I’ve previously picked the “seed bank” nits. The heroism of the past is important and should never be forgotten, but it detracts from the argument that collections like Pavlovsk are even more important for the future. The forest fires raging in Russia during the hottest summer on record by far will burn themselves out. The need to adapt food and farming systems to climate change, using the genetic diversity of places like Pavlovsk, will not.
Pavlovsk finally in the news, again
Priceless or worthless?
Absolutely nothing material has changed in the circumstances surrounding the possible destruction of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, which we first blogged about in April. The hearing date — when courts will decide whether the land should be bulldozed to make way for private houses, destroying the world’s largest genebank of fruits and berries — has come closer, of course. It is scheduled for 11 August, next Wednesday. And this morning the Global Crop Diversity Trust put out a new press release highlighting the imminent court case and adding to its public campaign to persuade the Russian Bear that berries are better than bungalows.
So, naturally, Pavlovsk is now in the news, for The Economist blogs, the BBC, Agence France Press, the NYT blogs, Bioversity International and bits of the blogosphere.
My absolute favourite bit of the stories is this quote from the Trust’s Press Release:
In a bit of Kafkaesque logic, the property developers maintain that because it contains a “priceless collection,” no monetary value can be assigned to Pavlovsk Station, so, therefore, it is essentially worthless. Furthermore, the Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate Development has argued that the collection was never officially registered and thus it does not officially exist.
Against this level of sophistry, what hope can mere letters, tweets and petition signatures have? Having said which, it would be nice to pleasantly surprised on Wednesday, or shortly thereafter. ((And kudos to those who have tweeted and written; see our sidebar for the roll of honour.))
The BBC’s story echoes a point made by Sergey Alexanian of the Vavilov Institute, that as the land is for sale, one way to save the collection would be for the Vavilov Institute to simply buy the sites.
“It’s a huge amount of money,” [Alexanian] said. “Right now, it’s not the best time for the Russian science, financially speaking, so buying it would be ideal – but it’s impossible.”
How about one of those newly-minted philanthrocapitalists making the impossible possible?
One final point. Many people out there are referring to Pavlovsk as a seed bank. This is not quite the whole truth. It is a field genebank, in which almost all the varieties are stored as living plants in the ground. This is necessary because most of the varieties do not breed true from seed. So the only way to maintain the varieties is as plants. Seeds would store the entire genetic diversity of the population, it is true, and could be easily moved, but seeds cannot be used to regenerate the specific package of associated genes that makes up a variety. It is those varieties that have been studied and characterized over the decades at Pavlovsk. It is the studies and the varieties to which they are attached that make the collection so important.