New LEISA Magazine on “Securing seed supply.”
Documenting Amazonian crop diversity
CODESU is the Consortium for Sustainable Development in Ucayali – an Amazonian department of Peru, with Pucallpa as its administrative centre. The consortium partners really recognize the importance of agricultural biodiversity in their development efforts – perhaps an unusual situation. The latest evidence of this committment is the germplasm catalog that has just gone online. It has information on cassava, peppers, beans and maize. There are other interesting resources on the website, including publications, though mainly in Spanish. You can read more about the efforts of CODESU in the management of crop diversity in traditional agroecosystems, and place them in a wider context, in a recent Bioversity International publication of that title.
Rabbits breeding like … rabbits
Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits reintroduced into their native habitat in the state of Washington are finally breeding, raising hopes that this endangered species will recover. Ok, so as wild relatives of a domesticated species go, this one is a fairly remote one, but who knew that “the domestic Oryctolagus cuniculus is believed to have originated in French monasteries in the late first millennium?”
Marginality and animal genetic resources
The conventional wisdom is that landraces and local breeds are better adapted to marginal conditions than modern crop varieties and livestock breeds. A paper has just been published in Agricultural Systems that tries to quantify this. The researchers defined marginal areas “as those areas where possible land uses are relatively limited because of higher altitude, shorter growing season, steeper slopes, less fertile soils or broadly speaking because of generally lower soil productivity.” They calculated a synthetic index of marginality using all kinds of environmental and socio-economic data and mapped its value throughout Europe. They also mapped the distribution of goat and sheep breeds using data from the Econogene project. Then they calculated how good the marginality index was at predicting the presence of local breeds. The result: “Increasing marginality, as measured by these indices, is positively and significantly correlated to the fact that local, traditional breeds are present.”
Re-wilding Europe
There was much talk a couple of years back about re-wilding – a suggestion to establish a plausible facsimile of the Pleistocene fauna of North America by introducing carnivore and herbivore species (including wild relatives of livestock) from Africa and elsewhere to the Great Plains. ((Check out a recent interview with a proponent. There’s even a Rewilding Institute now.)) But perhaps Europe might be a better candidate for this kind of thing.