- Art of biodiversity (some vaguely agricultural).
- Genebank for sturgeon. What the fish?
- Aromatic Green Dwarf. It’s a coconut.
- For the first half of his life, Gregorio Huanuco farmed to a rhythm that dictated the survival of his grandparents and ancestors for thousands of years.
- Fall foods.
- Camels have a hub.
- Genetic GPS.
- Taiwan pushes farm tours.
- The 100-yard diet.
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 His map is out of date, showing IPGRI in Rome.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.
Malanga comes through Ike
Cuba has not been lucky this hurricane season. The latest storm to hit is Ike. Damage to agriculture has been extensive, but there is a glimmer of good news:
In Cienfuegos, plantain and sweet potato are affected, as well as vegetables and citrus such as grapefruit and orange. The one crop that hasn’t been affected is malanga – a tuber kind of like potato.
Malanga is Xanthosoma, and Cuban researchers have had a great interest in the crop.
As Grahame Jackson says in his Xanthosoma Yahoo Group post, “diversity of local food crops is so important in countries where there are threats from natural disasters, hurricanes, torrential monsoons, droughts.” Indeed. And we do have some idea of where the threats are going to be concentrated, and therefore where agrobiodiversity will be most needed.
Wheat a surprise
I am, I confess, very confused by two items I read yesterday. The first is an extensive report on India’s readiness to deal with the UG99 variant of wheat rust disease. The headline declares India’s wheat immune to Ug99, but on alert. Making allowances for the difficulties faced by sub-editors the world over, I read on, and discovered that 12 wheat varieties popular in India have shown some level of resistance when grown at test sites in Kenya. The article goes on to say that these are being bulked up and offered to wheat breeders and that an eagle-eye is watching “the higher hills of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Southern hills in Tamil Nadu to detect and track down Ug99 or its variants”. There’s also reassuring talk of the time it will take for the disease to build up to a scale large enough to cause economic losses. The article’s broad, soothing conclusion:
Thus a multi-pronged strategy is already in place to render the rust ineffective even in the most unlikely event of Ug99 striking Indian territory. “We are confident and feel that such a vibrant technical programme will stand by Indian farming community and will be able to avoid any crisis likely to be caused by this disease,†ICAR said in a report.
My confusion: is this really the approach you would expect from a support-seeking government agency? ICAR is the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and its press release on UG99 is the only source for the Commodity Online story linked to above. I’d have thought that, far from seeking to downplay fears, ICAR should be informing India and the world that without a lot more research the country’s wheat crop will remain in grave danger.
Item number two is from Reuters, seen at Guardian.co.uk. It reports on a speech that Thomas Lumpkin, the new Director General of CIMMYT, gave in Canberra, Australia. In essence, Lumpkin used current high food prices (dropping now, as farmers respond to market signals) to warn that unless the world accepts genetically modified wheat, “People will die, a lot of people will die.”
“Governments should try to help the public appreciate how much the high price of food affects the poor in developing countries,” Lumpkin told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. “By denying them this technology, you are keeping them hungry, they are dying.”
He obviously feels strongly about that. My confusion: is CIMMYT actively researching GMO wheat, putting its money where its DG’s mouth is? Yes, but not much — roughly 0.5% of the “total research portfolio” in 2004. The greedy capitalist pigs at Monsanto and Syngenta aren’t willing to take the risk. CIMMYT doesn’t have pesky shareholders or customers to satisfy. Perhaps it will now get stuck in.
Oh, and, one final confusion. CIMMYT’s Lumpkin, unlike India’s ICAR, does think UG99 is a problem. “Wheat breeders world-wide are racing against time to control this new threat,” said the summary of his speech. Reuters didn’t mention that part.
Breadfruit catalogue online
From Diane Ragone, director of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii.
A catalogue of the breadfruit germplasm collection at the National Tropical Botanical Garden is now online as a searchable database on the Breadfruit Institute webpages. Varieties come to life through stunning photographs (courtesy of Jim Wiseman, DigitalMedia Hawaii/Pacific) that interactively present the visual gestalt of each tree, so necessary for accurate identification.
The database combines variety information acquired during field work in the islands of origin as well as descriptors, weights, and measurements of fruits, leaves, seeds, and male flowers, collected during a decade of research on the breadfruit trees at Kahanu Garden. Data and photographs are now available for close to 80 varieties. The entire collection of more than 100 varieties and three species will become available as photographs and data are completed.
Varieties from the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Hawaii, Kiribati, Mariana Islands, Palau, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu are currently represented in the database.
The database search page allows the user to find varieties by searching on scientific name (species), variety name, geographic origin, distribution, fruit weight, shape, or skin texture, seed number, and find those that do well in coastal, sandy soils or atolls. There is also a search option for varieties that will be available for distribution. Other search options include 20 selected varieties, a Pacific map showing where varieties were collected, and a list of variety names and synonyms.