Colleagues at FAO and Bioversity International have a paper out in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis entitled “Food composition is fundamental to the cross-cutting initiative on biodiversity for food and nutrition.” The cross-cutting initiative in question is that on biodiversity for food and nutrition which the CBD asked FAO to lead, in collaboration with Bioversity. And by the “food composition” of the title the authors mean databases which document the nutritional value of foods not just at the level of species, as currently, but of the different varieties and cultivars within species. These will in a way be a central pillar of the initiative. We’ve talked here before about the extensive variation that can exist among varieties in nutritional composition, for glycaemic index, say. And we’ve repeatedly highlighted the work of Lois Englberger and her Pohnpei colleagues in this field, for example. So it is good to hear that food composition tables and databases will be improved to allow the inclusion of infra-specific data. Populating the databases will be something else, of course. The data will need to come from existing genetic resources databases, which currently do not as a rule contain much in the way of this kind of information and are not necessarily equipped to handle it. So this initiative will involve a marriage between two database communities, that of nutritionists and that of genebanks. A difficult trick to pull off. Necessary, and long overdue, but difficult. Stay tuned.
Turning point, or dew on a leaf?
Elizabeth Finkel reports for Science from the 3rd meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Tunis last week. Here’s the bottom line:
In a remarkable and unexpected climax as the meeting drew to a close, the treaty governing body agreed to raise $116 million for a biodiversity fund that would support traditional farmers. That helped avert a crisis of confidence in the treaty, says Bhatti, who calls the meeting “a real turning point.” Worede, more circumspect, describes the biodiversity fund as a “little progress.” However, he says, “Anything voluntary is like the dew on a leaf: It can fall down at any time. The contributions should be binding.” ((Scientists Seek Easier Access to Seed Banks.))
Nibbles: Plant bombs, Reindeer and caribou, Livestock wild relatives, Agricultural geography of North Korea, Cyclone rehabilitation, AVRDC, Kew, Organic, Farmers and climate change
- Jacob alerts me that our “throw duplicates of all accessions from an airplane flying across Africa” Gedanken experiment may be closer to realization than we thought.
- Reindeer in trouble. In other news, there are 7 subspecies of the things.
- Indonesia looks to its threatened livestock wild relatives.
- Agriculture (among other things) in North Korea.
- Buffalo distributed in Myanmar. From where?
- Local vegetables promoted in the Philippines.
- More inspirational stuff on the Millennium Seed Bank from Jonathan Drori.
- Organizations Involved in Organic Plant Breeding Projects and Education. Not as many as you’d think.
- “Learning centres” helping farmers identify challenges, adapt to climate change.
Conserving evolution
Salvatore Ceccarelli, for many years a barley breeder at ICARDA, tells us about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a holistic approach to adapt crops to agronomy, climate changes and people.
That the climate is changing is now accepted by most, and certainly by old farmers in developing countries who are telling us of less snow falls, less ice in winter, less rainfall, more dusty days, and more importantly declining crop production in face of increasing production costs (fuel to pump irrigation water, fertilizers, etc.).
One question farmers often ask is if and how the crops and the varieties of the crops they grow today, and which provide us with food and feed, will cope with the future climate. The question is not an easy one to answer because while we all know that the climate is going to be drier and hotter, nobody can tell the farmer who asks the question how precisely much drier and hotter it will be in the place where he/she lives. But the same farmers who ask this question also help us to find an answer when they tell us that in years of drought only those farmers who are still growing the old traditional varieties (landraces) are able to harvest something.
Many of these landraces, even when they are no longer cultivated are still kept in genebanks, under very special conditions (low temperature and humidity) to keep them alive for a long time. However, by “freezing” seeds genebanks also “freeze” evolution at the time the landraces were collected, and this is not ideal at a time when we need the crops to be exposed to the changing climate so that they can slowly evolve (adapt) and produce new types that can better endure the future climate. Even if we do not know precisely what the climate will be, we should give the plants the opportunity to find out.
These are the principles of “evolutionary – participatory plant breeding”, a program by which we make available to farmers of different countries populations made by mixtures of landraces of the most important (to the farmers) crops available in genebanks. The mixtures will be planted in contrasting locations, particularly those representing high intensity of abiotic and biotic stresses.
In each location, the population will be left to evolve under the joint forces of natural and artificial selection operated by the farmers — but also by breeders (this is why we call it “participatory”). The system can be considered as a sort of “evolving genebank”. Because the mixtures can be planted in a very large number of locations – and with time can be shared by an increasing number of farmers – the populations are expected to evolve differently, responding not to only to climate changes but also to different types of soil, different agronomy, different uses of the crops and different farmers’ preferences etc. Therefore, in addition to the most obvious benefit of generating better crops for the future climate, this program will give a major contribution to increase agricultural biodiversity with all the associated benefits.
As the populations evolve in different directions, genebanks can periodically store samples of these evolving populations, thus “conserving evolution”.
Tunisian genebanks starts to fill up
Help me out here. What is so “worthy of praise” about getting duplicates of several hundred wheat accessions from the USDA and ICARDA genebanks and putting them into another genebank? Surely the Tunisian genebank is up to much more praiseworthy stuff.