- The Green Revolution has messed with rice rituals in Bengal.
- National Pig Day is coming up. Bacon for breakfast at last!
- The Star Trek tricorder finally arrives, though only for plant diseases so far.
- Organic beer can be good. You had me at beer.
- Speakin’ of bacon, make mine endangered.
- Biodiversity Fair held in Bhutan “to recognise the farmers’ contribution …; create awareness … and encourage farmers …; promote in situ conservation and … ex situ (gene bank) conservation; and provide … opportunities to exchange seeds.”
Nibbles: Indigenous knowledge, Buffalo, Wheat rust, Cassava, New Green Revolution, Environmentalism, Millennium Seedbank, USDA, Pig
- India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library a bulwark against piracy. Ahoy me mateys!
- Oh give me a home, where the buffalo-cow hybrid roamed.
- “We’ve found one of the most important disease resistance genes in wheat.”
- Cassava on its way to being a complete meal. Oh joy.
- Usual suspects debate GM.
- The history of the American wilderness movement deconstructed.
- Australia’s Northern Territory needs more collectors.
- “USDA People’s Garden announced today will eliminate 1,250 square feet of unnecessary paved surface at the USDA headquarters and return the landscape to grass.” Michelle likes it.
- Pig domestication, for Vavilov and now.
Assisting crop wild relatives
You may remember my recent nibble on assisted migration. I also sent the link to the CropWildRelatives discussion group, which elicited this response from Nigel Maxted at the University of Birmingham:
This is indeed an interesting question. My first reaction was that it was a purely academic exercise that will do little to benefit overall biodiversity and probably could not be applied for a wide range of species even if this were economically and practically feasible. It might even do harm because government might use research like this to play down the impact of climate change and avoid the necessity of taking harsh economic decisions. This may well be the case, but for the key 500-700 globally important CWR I do think this is the sort of research we should enacting now. These critical 500-700 species will be so vital to future food security, not least to combating climate change itself, that we need to ensure that they are allowed to continue evolving in situ in the changing environment and make doubly sure we have these species’ genetic diversity adequately conserved ex situ. The research need not focus on the entire 500-700 CWR but could be passed through a modeled climate change impact filter first to identify those species most likely to be impacted in the short term and most likely to be successful in transposition. Perhaps as a community the time is right to systematically address this issue.
Rooting for the tubers
The Root Crops Agrobiodiversity Project in Vanuatu is inventorying varieties in various villages around the archipelago, and coming up with some astonishing results. ((Although an old Pacific hand of my acquaintance disputes the inclusion of the Solomon Islands in this statement from the press release: “In other Pacific archipelagos, such as New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands, the introduction by the Europeans of new root and tuber species, combined with the arrival of a market economy, has totally disrupted the existing systems.”)) But, crucially, the work will not stop there. One of the objectives of the project is “to identify new varieties aiming at broadening the existing genetic bases and to propose them to producers and users, taking into account their needs and preferences.” So it’s more than the usual 3Cs — collect-characterize-conserve. There’s also creation, and dissemination, of new diversity, via seed production. That’s not that easy to do with taros and yams, but then, neither is conservation in conventional field and in vitro genebanks. It’s a very sensible idea to get the diversity increasing and moving around, rather than locking it up on research stations.
Nibbles: Bees, Honey, Fertilizers, Desertification, Nutrition, Decor, Mobile phones
- Bees under lots of “sub-lethal stresses.” I know how they feel.
- Hadzabe, who have been doing it for thousands of years, to be trained in honey production.
- Chinese farmers to be taught law of diminishing returns.
- “Workers at the Egyptian Desert Gene Bank in Cairo harvest and grow threatened desert species in its laboratory before replanting them to their native soils, hoping to revitalize threatened desert species.”
- Lao National Nutrition Policy puts nutrition at the centre of development.
- Economic botany and architectural fripperies.
- Got milk?