Category: Genetic diversity

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Anthropologists and geneticists see the origin of agriculture in different ways

Dorian Fuller has answered Paul Gepts’ comment on Dorian’s post at The Archaeobotanist on the multiple origin of agriculture, which I originally blogged about a few days ago. Let’s remind ourselves of the argument.

This was Dorian’s parting statement on the original post:

…agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways.

Paul Gepts countered with this:

As a geneticist, I am somewhat surprised that the issue of parallel inventions of agriculture is still an issue… biochemical and molecular data also show distinct, and likely, independent domestication in different geographical areas, not among only among different crops, but also within a crop gene pool.

And now Dorian again:

My sense is that most of the genetics community has shifted towards seeing multiple areas of independent origin, but within archaeology there is still a penchant for reducing historical complexities to as few origins as possible — often focusing on where more archaeological research has taken place rather than considering other forms of evidence (biogeography, genetics) that should encourage us to take up research in the less-explored or unexplored areas.

Read the full exchange.

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Nibbles: Drought resistant rice, Bees, Bison, Coffee in Kenya, Cassava in Africa, Pigeon pea, Chickens in Uganda, Green ranching in the Amazon, Climate change, Dates, Museums and DNA, Organic, Ecology meet

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Protecting rice in Thailand and India

I’ve pointed to a couple of different stories in the past few weeks dealing with the legal protection of rice diversity, and I thought it might be a good idea to bring them together here.

The first concerned aromatic Jasmine rice from Thailand. This was the lead paragraph:

On Wednesday, His Majesty the King applauded Thai scientists and those involved in the patenting of genes that can control the aroma of Thai jasmine rice. His Majesty said the patent would ensure that Thais take pride in eating Thai rice. They won’t have to eat rice that has a foreign patent.

However, it turns out the patent is actually for a transgenic aromatic rice, which is not quite the same thing. In fact, it would be difficult to protect the gene controlling the aroma of Thai rice, because that same gene also controls aroma in all other aromatic rices around the world. A recent paper suggests as much:

The badh2 mutation … [was] surveyed in a representative rice collection, including traditional aromatic and non-aromatic rice varieties, and strongly suggested a monophylogenetic origin of this badh2 mutation in Asian cultivated rices.

The second article is about rice with a red pericarp. This is often said to have health benefits, due to the accumulation of various nutrients along with anthocyanins.

Scientists are trying to protect a traditional rice variety that is on the verge of extinction in Himachal Pradesh. The red rice is more disease-resistant and hardier than strains cultivated commercially over most of India and can lend that through cross-breeding.”We are trying to provide legal protection to the vanishing red rice variety, grown in the state for centuries, by bringing it under the ambit of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001,” R.P. Kaushik, director of the rice research centre at CSK HP Krishi Vishvavidyalaya, an agricultural university based in Palampur. told IANS.

Now, red pericarp is the ancestral state in rice, and it’s occurrence is geographically widespread. ((It turns up in at least 20 countries in Asia and Africa, according to our mole at IRRI.)) So, again, if this rice is to be protected, it could not be protected simply as “red rice”, but rather as a particular, clearly defined, variety of red rice. Anyway, as Bhuwon points out in his comment on the article, if it fetches such high prices as the article suggest, is there really a need for legislative protection?

But then, arguments for legal protection of genetic resources are not always grounded in anything more than a sort of reflexive place-ism.

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Nibbles: Dogs squared, Afghanistan’s poppies, Rice at IRRI, Book on sapodilla chicle in Mexico, Opuntia, Trees

  • DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
  • Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
  • “When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
  • “The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
  • “An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
  • Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
  • TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.