- Boffins to rice: Pump it Up!
- Saving the nuts of Central Asia.
- Nepali women abandon hybrids for landraces and community seedbanks. Weird thing is that it’s a WWF project. But where are the extensionists? If only they had listened in Bhutan. Ok that packed a lot of links in there.
- Never saw an invasive I didn’t like.
- Architectural theorist tackles wine. Not many people hurt.
- Turns out 57 insect species can play host to that famous medicinal fungus that led to war between Tibetan communities a couple of years back. Which helps how?
- An envelope is opened at FAO.
- Seeds come to South Sudan. One hopes they are of the right kinds. And that somebody is collecting what was there before. Maybe someone should call WWF.
- You want vegetables with your fish?
- Crops for the Future says not all middlemen bad.
Protected areas in China: more and better needed
A big article in BioScience looks at the state of nature reserves in China, and finds them lacking. According to the press release:
Protected area managers in many cases currently lack basic data about which plant species are present on their reserves and even the exact area and extent of the reserves. Consequently, the effects of China’s rapid economic development, the related spread of invasive species, and the growth of tourism could drive to extinction species that could be sources of future crops and medicine.
Some things worth mentioning, from the article itself. ((I’ve made it available here because BioScience’s naming scheme means it won’t be available as easily next month.)) First, nice to see crop wild relatives getting a look in, although there is no mention of the agricultural biodiversity already being used by farmers either in the protected areas or outside them. Secondly, although the authors suggest preserving “very rare and threatened species” in some of China’s more than 140 botanic gardens, they don’t talk about conservation in genebanks, and they don’t talk about incentives for in-situ or on-farm conservation. In fact, the only incentives mentioned are those government should offer to persuade people to move out of the protected areas and into the cities.
So, once again, people are the problem. “Conflicts between the interests of rural communities and nature conservation need to be resolved,” and the way to do that is to move the people out of the way of conservation.
China has an opportunity to lead the world in developing a coherent conservation policy for plants important to agriculture, one that recognises the importance of diversity (as much Chinese agriculture has done), that integrates the various different forms of conservations, and that enlists the people who actually interact with plant diversity, manage it, even if only by default, and thus help to determine its future.
Nibbles: Refugia, Mann, Tree pix, Sparing v sharing, Lethal yellowing, Value chains, Coral sun-blocking, GlobalHort, Gravenstein, Pirate agrobiodiversity
- How species survive climate change.
- Charles C. Mann, author of great books on pre-Columbian America and the consequences of the Columbian Exchange, interviewed.
- Dreamy pictures of old British trees.
- “Protecting wild species may require growing more food on less land.” Great press release headlines of our times. Fortunately Mongabay has a discussion.
- Coconut lethal yellowing wreaking havoc in Mozambique.
- What makes a good food value chain?
- Boffins want to re-activate coral genes in temperate plants to stop them getting sunstroke. Or something.
- Old friend engaged by GlobalHort to work on position paper on “Promoting Agrobiodiversity for International Development: A Rationale and Roadmap for Collective Action”. Go, Hannah.
- Grapes vs apples in Sonoma County.
- Aaargh, pirates smoked like chimneys and drank like fish. Well I never. Anyway, nice to see them making full use of the local agrobiodiversity products.
Mapping potato genetic resources
And speaking of genetic erosion:
Land use tendencies between 1997 and 2005 shows that the total cropping area dedicated to improved cultivars has grown fast while the area reserved for native-floury and native-bitter landrace has remained more or less stable. Reduced fallow periods for existing fields and the gradual incorporating of high-altitude virgin pasture lands sustain areal growth. While areas of improved cultivars are proportionally growing fastest at extremely high altitudes between 3,900 and 4,350 m of altitude, overall cropping intensity or fallowing rates are inversely related to altitude. No evidence of a straightforward replacement of one cultivar category by another was found.
That’s from the winners of the third prize at the SCGIS/ESRI/SCB International Conservation Mapping Contest, Traditional Cartography section: CIP’s Henry Saul Juarez Soto, with Franklin Plasencia and Stef de Haan. Worth reading the whole thing.
A tale of genetic erosion narrowly averted
What causes genetic erosion? People in our business are way too fond of making lists of all the things that can possibly lead to a farmer abandoning a variety. But sometimes it’s just down to an accident. Take my mother-in-law. Please. No, but seriously, this is an interesting example of the law of unintended consequences. Bear with me. The mother-in-law grows some hybrid maize on her spread in the Limuru highlands of Kenya. Here she is with a bag of the stuff, which she likes, despite the recurrent cost, because of the large cobs.
But she also grows a local landrace which she says goes back to before independence. It doesn’t yield as much, but it has thick juicy stems, and she needs that for her cows. So she grows both the hybrid and the landrace, not mixed up in the same field, but often side by side. Would be interesting to look at the geneflow that’s been happening up there over the years, but that’s not the point of this story.
The point of the story is in fact that she almost lost the landrace recently. What happened is that last year she came to visit us in Rome for a few months, and left the farm in the otherwise quite capable hands of her daughter-in-law. Problem is, Violet, unaware of the preciousness of the landrace seed, went and fed most of it to the family. Fortunately, a handful or so survived, and quickly went into the ground for multiplication when grandma returned. You can see it here above. A close-run thing indeed. She says she would have been very upset if she had lost that seed, and asked me whether I could get it into Svalbard. After all, is that not my boss holding some seeds in front of the Vault? Well, yes, but…