Category: Genetic erosion

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The Indian mango problem

What’s going on with mangoes in India? It seems I can’t fire up my feed reader these days without some tale of mango woe popping up. If it’s not Noor Jahan being down to its last four trees, it’s the Kesar variety being cut down in Gujarat. And the Mango Mela — an agricultural fair held in Bangalore — only featured 20 varieties last year, after a really bad, low quality harvest. The latest thing is that Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh has gone from 700 varieties to just a few due to market pressures:

“The reason for certain mango varieties facing extinction threat is the fact that mangoes like Dussheri, Chosa, Lucknowi have taken over the market in a big manner. Mango growers get a good price for these varieties. However, mango varieties that are facing extinction are not able to make their presence felt in the market as there are few trees grown of these varieties,” Haji Kalimullah Khan, a veteran mango cultivator said.

It might be the season, I suppose. There does seem to be a spike of interest in mangoes in March-May. But are things really as bad as all that? Or is the press just focusing on the bad news and ignoring the good, as usual? And if things really are bad, is anything being done about it? Perhaps an expert on Indian mangoes will explain it all to us.

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Eden makes a comeback of sorts

It was over two years ago that we blogged about attempts to bring back Iraq’s southern marshes, and the agriculture they supported. Now, via Wired, there’s evidence from NASA of at least partial success.

A United Nations Environment Program assessment of the Iraq marsh restoration in 2006 concluded that roughly 58 percent of the marsh area present in the mid-1970s had been restored in the sense that standing water was seasonally present and vegetation was reasonably dense.

Here’s what this (partial) reclaiming of the marshes looks like from space:

But serious concerns remain: the water used for reflooding may not be sustainable as the population recovers and expands its agricultural efforts, and the region may have already suffered an irreversible loss of species diversity.

Would be nice to know to what extent traditional agriculture is also coming back. Maybe this could be discerned from the aerial images? What has happened to local landraces in the meantime?

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Nibbles: Biodiversity loss, Mapping, Mongolia, Ag origins, Polynesian voyaging, Hybrid fruits, Apricots, Bedouins, Donkeys, Chile, Cuba

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The Welsh pony story gets a happy ending, maybe

I mentioned earlier that DAD-Net is holding an e-consultation on threats to livestock diversity. There was a bit of discussion on the nature of the threats last week. One of the more interesting contributions came from Dafydd Pilling of the animal genetic resources group at FAO. He offered “an example in which the threat does not correspond exactly to any of the categories listed in the background document.”

The threat in question is the financial burden imposed on the owners of mountain ponies by the EU “horse passport” scheme. The story can be traced by visiting each of the following web pages in turn:

Passport threat to wild ponies

Time running out for wild ponies

Ponies saved from passport threat

Our little ponies facing extinction

Carneddau wild ponies

The problem goes back to 2004, and we noted it two years ago, but not the dénouement.

Three years ago the European Union passed a law that all such animals had to have a passport and be tagged. This costs £50 per animal, and at that time the ponies were only worth around £15 each so it just wasn’t going to be financially viable for us to keep protecting them.

Then seven local farmers got together, managed to secure Objective One funding and set up the Carneddau Ponies Association to fund and carry out this work.

…

We also want them classed as a rare breed, which would allow us to sell a group on one passport instead of individually.

Looks like livestock diversity is no less at risk from some EU regulation than the crop kind. Although Dr Pilling does add that “EU rules on ear tagging of cattle had been amended” when they were found to pose “a threat to extensive livestock management practices” in Europe. I’ll try to find out more about that one.