Our friend Danny over at Rurality has been on a bit of a rare livestock breeds hobbyhorse lately. First he noted that the UK’s new biodiversity indicators include consideration of native livestock breeds but not crop landraces. And that prompted him to sing the praises of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Quite right too.
Melaku Worede speaks
And this is what the veteran crop conservationist says:
Gene banks like the SADC gene bank, the Svalbard gene bank, and many others, focus only on collecting and preserving. How can you think you are conserving diversity when the very source upon which the seeds depend is not included? You can capture only so much, and in 100 years it will be useless because the planet will have changed. Perhaps you will be able to incorporate some genetic material into varieties and release them, but who is going to benefit from that? That is the big question.
I know what he means. You need to conserve the process, as well as the product. But I have another big question. If the world — read the climate — is changing as fast as many now fear, don’t you need the insurance policy that genebanks provide all the more?
GMO introgression risk mapped
Bioversity International’s Gene Flow Risk Assessment of Genetically Engineered Crops project, funded by GTZ and realized in collaboration with CIAT and Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), has got (some of) its products out. The project focused on the “likelihood of gene flow and introgression to crop wild relatives (CWR) and other domesticated species.” A book is coming, but you can see the risk maps for a number of crops online now. And there’s also a bibliography.
LATER: Jeremy points out, correctly, that “see” in the last sentence above is a bit of an overstatement. You need to do a bit more work than is perhaps implied.
Should we stay in darkness?
The Gibe III dam on the Omo River in southern Ethiopia will be the tallest of its kind in the world. It will generate a lot of much-needed electricity, but there are fears for its impact on the environment and (agro)biodiversity, and on the pastoralist and fishing lifeways of the peoples living downstream of it. Richard Leakey has come out forcefully against the project. The BBC puts it all beautifully in context on a map.
Saving an apple a day
The Renewing America’s Food Traditions alliance organized a Forgotten Fruits Summit on March 19th at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, Madison. According to Gary Nabhan, it was
…the first full gathering of America’s most accomplished back-country fruit explorers, veteran orchard-keepers, horticultural historians, pomological propagators, natural-born nurserymen and hard cider-makers concerned with the destiny of Malus x domestica, the single fruit most imbedded in the American identity.
The scary numbers:
- There were once 14,000 named varieties in American nurseries.
- Only some 1500 remain.
- 30 fruit nurseries are lost every year, since the late 1980’s.
Gary Nabhan and Jenny Trotter’s Forgotten Fruits Manual & Manifesto – Apples, which sets out “a plan of action to restore apple diversity to our farms, backyard orchards, restaurants and home tables” was on the table for discussion, and one of the objectives of the gathering was to develop “a strategy to assist those individuals who are doing the most to preserve American apple heritage.” The Manifesto is a very sensible mix of in situ and ex situ, NGO and government, private and public sector, young and old.
It will be interesting to see what the final strategy looks like, and to what extent it will be applicable elsewhere around the apple world. Gary does provide some hints about the direction the discussion took on his blog:
This spring, one of our honored participants, Creighton Lee Calhoun, will teach a workshop entitled “Grafting for the Future” from which each of the students will take home a tree grafted from one of the 400 varieties growing in the Southern Heritage Apple Orchard at Horne Creek Living Historic Farm near Pinnacle, North Carolina. On March 19th at Harvest Restaurant, founded by Chef Tami Lax in downtown Madison, we sampled some of the first world class hard ciders to come out of the new cideries flourishing in Great Lakes region, many of which are using heirloom apples that had once lost their markets. And we mentored a new generation of urban tree farmers and permaculturists that are bringing apples back to inner city landscapes that had altogether lost them over the last century.
I hadn’t come across the term hard cider before but it just means the alcoholic kind. Sounds like a fun meeting.