- Governing Agrobiodiversity by Regine Andersen. Anyone read it and want to review it for us?
- Louise Sperling on assessing the security of seed systems.
- Ike inflates Cohiba prices?
- Kibera slum goes very green. Via.
- “35 years ago, I was bringing seeds from France to California. Now I’m bringing seeds back to my friends in France.”
- John Innes Centre maps out a future for peas.
- Pictures from my recent trip to CATIE in Costa Rica, including some agrobiodiversity.
Jim Godfrey on the Potato
The challenges for potato production in the Developing World.
It is a delight to talk to people who are interested in food. My customers are only interested that they get delivery on time, the specification that they require, on time, and at the right price.
One billion people eat potatoes every day. They are good to eat and nutritious.
Chuno and tunta are “the original processed food that can be stored”. Freeze dried, and tunta is from very high Andes, from bitter potatoes, high in glycoalkaloids. After being freeze dried they are washed in streams to remove the glycoalkaloids and make them safe to eat. “However that was discovered, I do not know.”
History of the potato. Same old same old. Three million Irish lived on the produce of 1 acre or less ((What can this mean?)) of largely one variety, Lumper.
Major shift in past years, such that more potatoes are now being grown in the developing world than in the industrial world, especially in sub Saharan Africa.
Belarus has the highest consumption in the world.
32 food deficit, low income countries that are hit very hard when supplies are tight, which they are now.
Potato has greatest potential to increase supply, 4.5% versus other major food crops growing at 1.5% per year.
Talks a bit about CIP and the rest of the CGIAR centres. Erk! His map is out of date, showing IPGRI in Rome. And there’s a photo of a smiling Jim Godfrey taking true potato seed into the Global Crop Diversity Trust’s vault in Svalbard.
Explains how CIP maps poverty, agriculture and policy and looks for intersections to decide where to work. Environmental vulnerability and the threats of climate change will affect tropical areas most. Shows reduction of growing season (for potatoes) in Africa, which will also be repeated elsewhere. Need to study mitigation, adaptation and assessment to feed that into policy changes to approach climate change.
Interesting map that shows “physical water scarcity” and “economic water scarcity” separately. What can this mean?
Cost benefit analysis of programmes shows that work on virus-free sweet potato material in one province in China alone has “paid for the whole of the investment in CIP over the past thirty years”.
On biodiversity, talks about reduction of genetic diversity from 1900 to 1970 in wheat, but that CIMMYT has worked specifically to increase that diversity. “Just as well,” because of Ug99, which, he says, could have been disastrous if it had happened in the 1970s.
On to crop genebanks, “a precious resource for future food security”. Not as simple as just shifting varieties about to respond to climate change, because need to adapt to different daylengths etc etc.
Late blight, and the arrival of A2 mating strain. Arrived in 1976, as a result of the drought in Europe, which forced down barriers and allowed in potatoes from Mexico. Salutary lesson about unforeseen consequences of food shortages. Now another strain, blue13 is rampant in Europe.
Native diversity in Peru. Each family keeps roughly 8 varieties, a whole community keeps about 122.
Solanum phureja has a very high iron variety, and other varieties that are very rich in vitamin C.
“Eating is an agricultural act. What we eat defines how we take care of our land.” Wendell Berry.
A slide of diverse local potato chips draws loud ooohs of admiration.
On orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, introduced in Africa, where vitamin A deficiency is a big problem: “We’ve seen a reduction in blindness, a reduction in under-five mortality, a reduction in maternal mortality, and a prolongation of the lives of AIDS sufferers.”
No time for questions.
Nibbles: Women, Rats, Figs, Mammoths, Castor oil, Heirlooms, Orchards, Genebanks
- “Take into account both women’s and men’s preferences when developing and introducing new varieties.”
- Rats!
- Domestication of figs pre-dates that of cereals?
- Neanderthals liked barbecue.
- Underutilized plant in homegarden a terror threat.
- Heirloom bean farmer feted by Washington Post, added to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog blogroll.
- Orchards as hotspots of agrobiodiversity.
- “…grass pea is a ‘poster child’…”
Exploring a Belgian genebank
I’m jealous of Luigi’s ability to work and play almost simultaneously. ((Not that there’s any real difference. For either of us.)) He visits a market in Sarajevo and within hours his words and pictures are gracing this page. I visit a genebank in Belgium and it is more than a fortnight before I manage to pull anything together. But no more whining. On with the show.
I was privileged to get a guided tour of the International Transit Centre in Leuven, home of Bioversity’s International Musa collection, which is supported in part by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. There are good reasons for it to be in Belgium, but it is still a glorious sight to see banana plants scraping the roof of a 5-metre tall greenhouse.
That’s Rony Swennen in the picture, doing his tour guide schtick in the main greenhouse. He runs the show. One of the things that’s hard to understand, coming from a purely cultivated view of the banana, is the role that some species play in the wild. They can be really opportunistic colonisers.
Just in front of Rony was a specimen of Musa velutina, with pinky-red skinned fruit. And beneath it, a veritable carpet of seedlings. M. velutina is a pioneer species that often spreads rapidly into newly cleared areas and can choke riverbanks and the like.
It isn’t all bananas in the greenhouse. There is also Taro, and a few other tropical crops that are normally propagated vegetatively. Leuven has been named a Global Centre of Excellence in Cryopreservation. The researchers have perfected the protocols for preserving banana cells in liquid nitrogen, and now they tweak them for many other crops and train scientists from other countries to do the delicate work of cryopreservation.
Cryopreservation has many benefits over keeping plants in tissue-culture, the standard genebank technique for clonal crops. It’s cheap and efficient, once the capital costs are accounted for. But both methods can obscure problems. Frozen material, just like stuff in tissue culture, occasionally suffers a mutation in its DNA. So from time to time samples are grown out to check that they haven’t changed dramatically. The plant on the left has, and the batch from which it came will be discarded. The rate of such off-types is about 7%. That’s low. But the genebank has multiple samples of each accession, to be sure, to be sure.
So there you have it. A quick romp through what I did on my recent travels. More later.
Nibbles: Favas, Olives, Insects, Beer, Hallucinogen
- UK breeders scour ICARDA’s fava beans for better genes. What next? Chianti?
- Olive cultivation then and now. An archaeologist speaks.
- Entomophagy.
- Lager yeast origins.
- Salvia divinorum: underutilized no longer.