A long article in icWales, the self-described “national website of Wales,” details the predicament of the local pony breed. Once an important part of everyday rural life – and indeed industrial life, due to their use in coal mines – more recently a children’s trekking pony, there is now limited demand for the breed. Wild herds have thus declined dramatically, no doubt resulting in genetic erosion. Does it matter? A resounding yes echoes around the hills.
Indian potato chips
Indian potato growers are turning to a new, low-sugar variety of potato because it is better for making chips (crisps if you’re British), for which there is rapidly increasing demand. Would be interesting to monitor the effect on “local” varieties, no?
Magnolias in trouble
The Global Trees Campaign says that 131 of 245 wild Magnoliaceae are threatened worldwide. According to this press release from BGCI:
The significance of this potentially catastrophic loss lies not only in the threat to the genetic diversity of the family, but also because they are a highly sensitive indicator of the well-being of the forests in which they are found. Magnolias are among the most ancient groups of flowering plants and have long been cultivated by mankind.
You can download a PDF of the new Magnoliaceae Red List. The publication of the red list has been widely covered by the press, including New Scientist. Many species have medicinal uses and some are used for food.
Predictably, protected areas are highlighted as an important approach to the conservation of these species, particularly in their hotspot in southern China. A separate new study
concludes that protected areas are necessary for preventing the loss of species due to climate change – provided that shifts in species’ ranges are factored into early analysis of whether to expand current protected areas or create new ones.
The new red list includes distribution maps of all magnolias, clearly an important first step.
Green Revolution 2.0
We’ve blogged before about reaction to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. A significant portion of the $150 million earmarked for the Alliance will go into improving crop varieties, using both conventional breeding and biotechnological approaches. Two more takes on the whole thing came out today. Here, the great Ethiopian plant genetic resources conservationist Melaku Worede talks about what went wrong with the first Green Revolution, and what he fears will happen in Africa if the same thing is tried there. While here you can read about how high-placed politicians in Mozambique say the country is “striving toward a green revolution to improve and diversify agriculture and increase food production†and are putting their money where their mouths are.
P.S. Incidentally, the BBC World Service has a new series called “Feeding the World,” and the first programme is about the Green Revolution. You can download a podcast here.
Syrian agricultural stats
You may remember a post some time back on an atlas of agriculture in Bhutan. Now here’s an on-line database of governorate-level agricultural statistics for Syria. Maybe not as nice as an atlas, but still pretty useful for planning agricultural biodiversity conservation. Especially as there is time-series data going back to 1985, which could be used to identify areas of genetic erosion through the (admittedly imperfect) proxy of decreasing total acreage. But when will agricultural statisticians and census-takers start collecting data on numbers of varieties, at least of staple crops?