Category: Genetic erosion

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Farmer Field Schools in the Pacific and beyond

Danny Hunter has sent us this contribution. Until recently, Danny ran the TaroGen and DSAP projects at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Fiji. Thanks, Danny.

An interesting article from SciDevNet about farmer empowerment through Farmer Field Schools (FFS) reminded me of a great little programme that we had running in Samoa in the late nineties.  Farmer Field Schools began as a training and extension approach for integrated pest management of rice, largely supported by FAO in Asia. Since then FFS have been used for a variety of agricultural crops, systems and problems, including livestock, and have spread to other regions of the world.

The article prompted me to reflect on earlier efforts that we made at the Alafua Campus of the University of the South Pacific in Samoa, using similar “field-based” approaches to help students and farmers (as well as researchers and extensionists!) learn about taro diversity and improvement. In 1993 Samoa was devastated by an outbreak of taro leaf blight. Initial responses using pesticides and cultural methods were futile and while introduced “resistant” varieties helped, the disease was still a major problem.

Continue reading “Farmer Field Schools in the Pacific and beyond”

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Rescuing the American chestnut

You know, these Nibbles (the short, soundbite-type things which appear at the top of the right sidebar of this page) are fun to do, but sometimes you end up downplaying, or over-simplifying, an important, interesting — and interestingly complex — story. Take what I said about the American chestnut a few days ago. The recent history of Castanea dentata is proud and tragic ((Looking further back, it also played an important role in native America agroforestry.)), and efforts to bring it back from the brink of annihilation well-nigh heroic. To imply, as I did, that these efforts were confined to hybridizing the American with the Chinese chestnut was justified only by the necessity for extreme brevity. In fact, of course, it is not just hybridization but repeated back-crossing. And not just interspecific crossing but also painstaking crossing among the few remaining pure American chestnuts, as reported in the article that prompted me to revisit the original story and hopefully make amends for my earlier flippancy.

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Seed Regulation: How much is enough?

Earlier this year we posted about how EU Regulations destroy agricultural biodiversity and proposed rules to allow the marketing of European traditional varieties. Eliseu Bettencourt, a colleague with a close interest, said then that he didn’t have enough time to intervene in the discussion. Now, he says, he has a chance. Which would be kind of dull except that he’s seen the very latest drafts of the documents …

The post of 19th February 2007 refers to the “Draft Commission Directive establishing the specific conditions under which seed and propagating material of agricultural and vegetable species may be marketed in relation to the conservation in situ and the sustainable use of plant genetic resources through growing and marketing”, supposedly due to come into force on 1st April 2007. The Directive did indeed materialize as the writer of the post so rightly guessed then, though he even refrained from the obvious joke.

I guess the writer was referring to the draft document of May 2006, which bore that title. According to the drafts I have had access to later, in February 2007, that document was sub-divided intro three different documents, respectively: Continue reading “Seed Regulation: How much is enough?”