- Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review. Traditional foods contribute to dietary diversity, micronutrient intake and food security. Nutrition policy should pay more attention to what people used to eat.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Soil-focused regenerative practices are associated with more diverse diets, through a mixture of production, income and market effects. Soil health has a dietary dimension.
- The Relationship among Food Environment Types, Diet, and Nutrition Outcomes in Women, Children, and Adolescents from Low- and Lower-Middle Income Countries. What surrounds people matters as much as what they grow: food environments influence dietary diversity and nutrition in complicated ways, but access to wild foods is usually a good thing.
- Allele-specific expression reveals complex regulatory divergence underlying fruit phenotypic differences between cultivated and wild tomato species. Wild tomato relatives harbour genetic variation for sugars, volatiles and other flavour traits that domestication left behind. A reminder that “improvement” can be a process of subtraction. Not nutrition you say? I bet flavour is connected with nutrition — in complicated ways.
- Large-scale phenotyping and multi-trait selection identify low-methane Napier grass accessions under contrasting environmental conditions. Napier grass accessions differ substantially in methane yield, digestibility and other traits. Feed diversity could help reduce livestock emissions without sacrificing everything else. Cows need better nutrition too.
The bit in between
We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process is what happens between those places.
A new IIED report, Nature Nurture: How to keep agrobiodiverse forest and farm systems alive in the modern world, looks at local collective community organisations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania and how they support on-farm conservation and use of crop diversity. In Tanzania, community seed banks lend seed to farmers, who return it after harvest; seed exchanges have brought previously little known local varieties into the banks. In the Philippines, a demonstration farm maintains traditional sweetpotato varieties for distribution. In Indonesia, producer groups run nurseries while much seed management remains in farmers’ hands.
Farmer-run seed banks, demonstration farms and nurseries give communities ways to organise for themselves the conservation and use of crop diversity. That’s great. But what if something goes wrong? A crop disappears from a village. A variety falls out of use in a district. A community seed bank loses its stock. And what if a variety being maintained in one place could be useful somewhere else, perhaps very far away?
This is where the bit in between comes into play.
Nature Nurture has very little to say about how seeds and knowledge move to and fro between farmers and community organisations on one side and formal genebanks on the other. It recognizes their complementarity, but deals with it in a single sentence: “While ex-situ conservation remains an important safeguard against genetic erosion, the farmer-led and Indigenous systems that actively sustain agrobiodiversity within living production landscapes must have greater recognition and investment.” That’s all true, but somehow insufficient.
The report does promise practical guidance for collective organisations in its next phase. How they can connect with national genebanks would be a good place to start. Meanwhile, though, national genebanks should be doing the same. Maybe by re-thinking their information systems, as I suggested a few days ago.
Two legends of agricultural transformation
Land sparing is a seductive story.
Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky land sharing business. Everybody wins.
A new paper in Agriculture and Human Values calls this a “policy legend”: a complicated and contested body of research gets turned into a simple, reassuring story about technology and intensification. The politics of who owns land, who benefits from intensification, what gets produced and where, and what happens to rural livelihoods very conveniently disappear from the equation.
But the other side of the debate has its own temptations. Agroecology as a movement is often explicit about context, politics and food sovereignty. Yet it too can occasionally shrink to something that’s cosily tidy: conventional agriculture is the problem, agroecology is the solution, here are some desirable practices, get farmers to switch.
Another new paper, this one in Ecological Economics, also makes that story look way too simple. And you know how we love that here. The authors look at 2,721 farms in six African countries and find very different starting points for the transition to agroecology, and different trajectories. The smallest farms tend to combine autonomy and income diversification; larger farms more often go for some crop-livestock integration; small and medium farms may put more land into legumes for soil health.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The way farmers make decisions is complicated. And I coincidentally came across a study in Food and Nutrition Bulletin that illustrates that rather well, albeit on a small scale. Surveys of 26 farmers in the Ecuadorian highlands found that they grew diversity for economic reasons, sure, but also for social, emotional or health and safety reasons. And, rather wonderfully, sometimes simply because they liked it.
Farm size, labour availability, markets, tenure, risk, access to inputs, knowledge, household objectives and yes, sheer aesthetics, all shape what farmers can do, are willing to do, and indeed eventually end up doing. Change one part of the system, and you can change the economics of the rest.
So why do we keep reaching for legends?
Simple stories are useful, I guess. They fit snugly into funding proposals, policy briefs and campaign slogans, and every camp needs something to organise around. Unfortunately, agriculture is way messier than the legends we tell about it.
Nibbles: Historical photos, Belgian pears, Miombo fruits, Kenya seed treble, Nepal landraces, Women
- Haga Hideo’s 1950s photos of Fukushima farming rituals are now being used to revive them: ex situ conservation, but for culture.
- Long before photography, or “pre‑breeding” was a buzzword, Belgian pomologist Jean‑Baptiste Van Mons was running massive pear selection trials and gifting us Beurré Bosc and Doyenné Boussock.
- As Southern Africa’s miombo woodlands shrinks, scientists are cloning wild trees so the fruit — and food security — outlive the forest. Now for the pre-breeding.
- Greenpeace Africa’s Seed Project makes the case for indigenous seeds as a route to farmer independence. And you can help.
- And oh so coincidentally, a network of community seed banks in Kenya is rescuing indigenous seeds so the diversity is still around when opportunity (or crisis) knocks.
- Also in Kenya, the national genebank’s collectors are racing to secure opportunity crops.
- Nepal’s indigenous crops and landraces are at the same time more needed than ever, and under threat. So, much like in Kenya.
- The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT says women are at the center of sustainable food systems; the fine print adds: “as they have always been.”
Restarting a relationship with seeds
Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently.
In her Ambrook piece, Emma Glassman-Hughes follows the return of ancestral corn to Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities in the northeastern US. While Rowen White, who is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, explores the cultural and spiritual meaning of seeds, farming and “fertile resistance” in a conversation with For the Wild. Now, I don’t think that formal genebanks were involved in either case, but together the two pieces raise an intriguing question for them: what happens to the knowledge that travels with a seed when the seed comes home?
White talks about seeds as relatives: carriers of relationships, cultural memory and knowledge. Glassman-Hughes’s story makes the problem more tangible, if less poetic. Metacom corn has returned to Wampanoag land after roughly 350 years, but the people, landscape and farming conditions have changed in the meantime. No complete set of instructions came with the seeds. But even if they had, they probably wouldn’t be much use now. People had to experiment, observe and learn again.
I think that’s an interesting lesson. We tend to think of traditional knowledge as something that can be documented when an accession is collected and then preserved and made use of, much like the seeds themselves. But information that was useful to a farmer even just a generation ago may no longer be relevant in changed circumstances. Some knowledge may have been lost, some may have evolved, and new knowledge emerges when people start growing the crop again.
We’ve talked about this here before. Back in 2010, I wrote about a social media exchange between taro breeders in Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A video posted by breeder John Cho sparked a conversation in which people translated results, identified promising hybrids, compared performance in different countries and even discovered discrepancies in the identity of some material. I asked then whether this kind of open-ended discussion might be more useful for encouraging the use of crop diversity in genebanks than conventional accession-by-descriptor tables.
A week later, I pushed the idea further, asking whether genebank documentation needed a “social networking makeover.” My point wasn’t that we should abandon databases. (Although…) I was trying to put the people using and evaluating germplasm at the centre, allowing their observations, questions and experiences to accumulate around the accession, while still feeding validated information into structured databases.
If knowledge about a seed changes as people grow it, select it, use it and adapt it, then a genebank accession’s record is just a starting point. When material is returned to cultivation, what people learn about it should have a way of flowing back into the conservation system. So it can be used by the next in line.
Rematriation is not just returning seeds, it is restarting a relationship with those seeds. That doesn’t mean every genebank needs a community liaison officer. (Although…) Nor should genebanks romanticise traditional knowledge or assume that a community’s current practices are frozen remnants of the past. It does mean recognising that seeds have a social life, and that the knowledge surrounding them changes too.
The practical challenge is to build conservation systems that can value not only what we know about an accession when we put it away, but what people learn about it when we bring it back. And that, fundamentally, means recognizing that those people should have a stake in the genebank documentation system. That’s far from the case now.