Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Not content with bringing you Our Man Hijmans’ dynamite written dispatches from Harlan II, today, The Spoken Word. David Williams, coordinator of the CGIAR’s System-wide Genetic Resources Programme, appeared on Insight, a daily in-depth interview programme hosted by radio station KXJZ in Sacramento, California. David talked about domestication, genetic modification, the history of collecting, the importance of crop wild relatives and much else besides.
Listen to it here. (About 12 minutes.)
A couple of days ago the Evil Fruit Lord complained — a little bit — about an article in a Ugandan newspaper which extolled the virtues of traditional crops and varieties over new-fangled hybrids. While not doubting the many attractive qualities of landraces and heirloom varieties, he quite rightly pointed out that there’s nothing to stop modern varieties and hybrids tasting just as good:
I get really sick of the tendency to talk about plant breeding as a process which makes crops into finicky, crappy tasting garbage in exchange for yield. You absolutely can create varieties which taste as good (or better) than traditional varieties, produce more, and resist pests. In fact, plant breeding is the only way to get to that.
Now there’s an article by Arthur Allen in Smithsonian magazine which basically says — not very surprisingly, I suppose — that both those things have happened in the tomato:
Flavor … has not been a goal of most breeding programs. While importing traits like disease resistance, smaller locules, firmness and thicker fruit into the tomato genome, breeders undoubtedly removed genes influencing taste. In the past, many leading tomato breeders were indifferent to this fact. Today, things are different. Many farmers, responding to consumer demand, are delving into the tomato’s preindustrial past to find the flavors of yesteryear.
Allen has a good word to say for the wild relatives:
The architect of the modern commercial tomato was Charles Rick, a University of California geneticist. In the early 1940s, Rick, studying the tomato’s 12 chromosomes, made it a model for plant genetics. He also reached back into the fruit’s past, making more than a dozen bioprospecting trips to Latin America to recover living wild relatives. There is scarcely a commercially produced tomato that didn’t benefit from Rick’s discoveries. The gene that makes such tomatoes easily fall off the vine, for instance, came from Solanum cheesmaniae, a species that Rick brought back from the Galapagos Islands. Resistances to worms, wilts and viruses were also found in Rick’s menagerie of wild tomatoes.
And he also plugs genebanks:
…we can take comfort in the tomato’s continuing, explosive diversity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a library of 5,000 seed varieties, and heirloom and hybrid seed producers promote thousands more varieties in their catalogs.
Not quite sure where he got that number, as the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center seems to have about 3,500 accessions, but anyway.
Andy Jarvis, our man with the global insights, sends this despatch:
This article just came out in Science about assisted colonization. ((O. Hoegh-Guldberg, L. Hughes, S. McIntyre, D. B. Lindenmayer, C. Parmesan, H. P. Possingham, C. D. Thomas (2008). ECOLOGY: Assisted Colonization and Rapid Climate Change Science, 321 (5887), 345-346 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157897)) That is the fancy term for moving a population from one place to another. Over the past few years this concept has been gaining ground, especially with the barrage of horror stories about the impacts of climate change on the geographic range of species. The authors propose a decision framework to identify candidate species for translocation (or assisted colonisation as it seems to now be called). The decision framework consists of criteria for threat, feasibility, and cost-benefit. Amazingly, the whole concept of ecological risk is not taken into account in the decision framework. The authors mention it in the text, and sidestep the issue somewhat by saying that these are short distance translocations, but this may not always be the case. With the best of intentions, we’ve had some really great “assisted colonisation” events in the past that have caused ecological disaster. See Australia, Lake Victoria, the Southern US, etc. etc. The list is endless.
Before I go too far, I must step back and state the positive side of this concept. After all, the objective is conservation. Done properly, with sound risk analysis of direct and indirect impacts on ecological communities (and anthropogenic systems, like … errrr… agriculture), assisted colonisation could save species from near certain doom. An innocent way of seeing it is that you are just lending a hand to species who can’t quite migrate as fast as others. If migration rates are lower than the speed of climate change, or a pesky river gets in their way, then ecologists come to the rescue and move you. It’s like helping an old lady across the road.
Avoiding long-distance assisted colonisation is a useful surrogate for “eco-safety” (a new term is born), but I think it is dangerous as many assumptions are being made with that one. Suggested next article: Risk analysis framework for assisted colonisation. Readers get going.
As a side note, and while I am in the mood for inventing new terms, we also need to come up with a name for this kind of conservation. We have in situ, we have ex situ. What would be good for this kind of conservation? Non-situ could well be the case if you don’t assist colonisation, but I can’t think of a good name for populations that are assisted. Anyone fancy a place in the history books by giving this a name? ((I propose neo-situ. Ed.))
How much crop genetic diversity have we lost? At one level, the question is easy to answer: three quarters over the last century. That’s certainly the number that’s most often quoted.
But that doesn’t make it right. In particular, I have it on very good authority that the figure may in fact be traceable back — a la Chinese whispers — to a statement in Fowler & Mooney’s 1990 book Shattering: “As the mid-1970s were reached, three-quarters of Europe’s traditional vegetable seed stood on the verge of extinction.”
Not quite the same thing. Anyway, be that as it may, the existence of a dominant narrative hasn’t stopped people going out into the field and — the horror! — actually collecting data.