- Vikings got high.
- “How can you and your garden help us find out more about the global biodiversity associated with the plants in gardens?” Here’s how.
- The oldest olive press in Anatolia.
- “The Mistake: Writing a proposal that showcased knowledge rather than addressing the audience’s needs.” Indeed.
- The Solution: cool downloads from Gapminder.
- The only surviving illustrated Old English herbal. And, from several centuries later, a medieval book on how gardens will save you.
- AramcoWorld on my favourite nut.
- Cannibalism is a choice.
- One kick-ass botanist.
- Saving Ethiopia’s coffee forests. Nah, let’s just map the genome.
- Vanilla has dark side.
- The Profit of the Earth: cool new book on seeds, dark side and all.
- Remember my little trip to the Spanish genebank? What they’re doing on brassica.
A focus on farmers
A whole bunch of interesting reports for your delectation today. From our friends Ola Westengen ((Who I believe has contributed here, in the interest of full disclosure.)), Teshome Hunduma and Kristine Skarbø at NORAGRIC comes “From Genebanks to Farmers. A study of approaches to introduce genebank material to farmers’ seed systems.”
This report reviews strategies, methodologies and projects that exist to facilitate direct access to genebank material for farmers. Based on a literature review, a survey as well as interviews and data collection from key actors in conservation and development oriented seed system work, we trace trends in the field and develop a typology of approaches.
It’s not long, so read the whole thing. But a couple of things to whet your appetite. First, the categorization of approaches:
- Reintroduction
- Community Seed Banks (CSB)
- Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB)
- Emergency Seed Interventions
- Variety Introduction
- Integrated Seed System Approaches
You can argue with it, but I do like a taxonomy to start things off. Second, the data.
…farmers, farmer organizations and NGOs indeed comprise a substantial user group of the CGIAR genebanks, receiving some 7% of the samples, on par with the distribution to commercial sector requestors.
Always good to have the data. And finally, the challenges: (1) reaching scale, (2) achieving long term sustainability, and (3) legal aspects. In particular scaling up, always a bugbear.
The scale challenge is both a question of seed availability and the number of beneficiaries involved. Genebanks are only able to distribute small quantities of seeds and in all approaches described here the seed multiplication step is to a lesser (e.g. PPB) or larger extent (e.g. emergency seed interventions) critical. There is furthermore a need for exploring ways to scale up in terms of numbers of farmers reached. Some of these approaches, in particular PPB and CSBs, are so resource intensive that the number of farmers directly involved in each project is likely to remain limited. On the other hand, the crowdsourcing approach to varietal evaluation promoted in the Seeds4Needs initiative coordinated by Bioversity International represents a promising strategy for large scale on farm evaluation of diverse portfolio of crops.
Susan Bragdon’s work is quoted in the report, and concidentally she has three (count them) things out this month, published by the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO).
- Are Small-scale Farmers at the Table? Reflections on Small-scale Farmers’ Participation in Global and National Decision-Making: “…six recommendations for how multilateral institutions that host negotiations or dialogues can encourage and facilitate the participation of small-scale farmers.”
- The Foundations of Food Security – Ensuring Support to Small-scale Farmers Managing Agricultural Biodiversity: “…a rights-based approach supported by governments nationally and internationally [e.g., the Plant Treaty] open broader possibilities of predictable, stable support.”
- The Evolution of Rights and Responsibilities over Agricultural Biodiversity: “…suggestions on how to create a system that supports the critical role that agricultural biodiversity plays in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.”
The culmination of this flurry of activity from Susan and QUNO is a call to action paper, The Time is Ripe for Governments to Strengthen Sustainable and Food-Secure Farming, in which….
…the Small-Scale Farmers and Agrobiodiversity Dialogue to Action Group (DtA) calls upon the international community to mobilize resources for a more proactive role of the public sector in supporting small-scale farmers, their seed systems and the protection of agricultural biodiversity. Furthermore, the group calls upon national governments to engage in consultation with small-scale farmers to identify what they require in order to effectively engage in activities to support the conversation and sustainable use of biodiversity and to achieve secure livelihoods.
Ok, so there’s a lot to take in here, but if I were to try to encapsulate the take-home message for you, it would be this phrase from the description of the second of Susan’s papers listed above:
…increased private sector interest in agriculture and food systems is reason for equally vibrant governments acting in the public interest.
And international genebanks too, I suppose.
Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity
- Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
- Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
- Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
- The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
- Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
- Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
- Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
- Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
- Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
- Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
- To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
- Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
- Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
- Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
- Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
- Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.
Nibbles: Mango genebank, Japanese elite fruit, Mother Hass, African cattle diversity, New wild ginger, Seed saving, False ivory, ABS, Deforestation, Blight causes, Desert ag, Conserving potatoes, Imperial botany
- Goa to set up a mango genebank. Where do I donate?
- The murky world of really expensive Japanese fruit.
- What is this one avocado tree worth?
- The importance of indigenous African cattle breeds.
- You can never have too many wild ginger species.
- Saving seeds in South Carolina.
- Seeds save elephants.
- IFPRI meeting discusses the increasing complexity of germplasm access and benefit sharing.
- Food giants look to their greenify their value chains. Will they finally decide to secure their genetic base too?
- Irish potato famine: don’t blame the near-fungus.
- Chinese oasis is engineering wonder: and the crops?
- Pachamama and the ever-so-humble potato.
- Review of book on the imperial origins of botany.
Brainfood: Soil biodiversity maps, VIR wheat, Rice worlds, African maize, Cold rice, Saharan history, Oil palm & CC, GM Cavendish
- Assessing soil biodiversity potentials in Europe. The hotspots are the pastures and grasslands of Ireland, Slovenia and Sweden.
- Into the vault of the Vavilov wheats: old diversity for new alleles. VIR has diversity that’s not in CIMMYT and Australian cultivars. No word on where ICARDA fits in.
- Disembedding grain: Golden Rice, the Green Revolution, and heirloom seeds in the Philippines. There are parallel and competing rice worlds, which differ in how they valorize the local. Or, it could be argued, though not by the authors, demonize the “other.”
- Microsatellite DNA marker for molecular characterization of African maize (Zea mays L.) landraces. The Somali material is weird.
- Genetic architecture of cold tolerance in rice (Oryza sativa) determined through high resolution genome-wide analysis. 42 QTLs. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot.
- Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period. Damn livestock. Back to hunting and gathering.
- Future climate effects on suitability for growth of oil palms in Malaysia and Indonesia. Well that’s ironic.
- Golden bananas in the field: elevated fruit pro-vitamin A from the expression of a single banana transgene. Gene from Fe’i biofortifies Cavendish. Now to do something about taste, texture, general suckiness etc etc.