Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Bob is healthy

Via Lois Englberger comes news of Bob Festival Day in the Marshall Islands last Saturday, 24 April. Bob is not some guy, but rather the Pandanus tree. Lois shared Lydia Tibon’s description of the event, which we reproduce below. Pandanus is very important throughout the Pacific, where it has multiple uses. Lois is particularly interested in its beta carotene content. Our thanks to both her and Lydia.

KIJLE (Kora in Jiban Lolorjake Ejmour), meaning “women assisting to promote good health,” participated. We wanted to remind everyone that Bob is better than eating processed foods.

As you can see, the table, chairs, everything hanging and inside our float were pandanus-made. Our kids, grannies were chewing and throwing bobs to everyone. Our billboard message was to promote both education and health.

Our motto is Bob Dikdik Kejadikdrik, the translation is something like “Bob is so fruitful.” It produces so much, it gives us so much knowledge that we use the leaves by weaving the mats, making hats, use to drink medicines, also gives Vitamin A that is very rich to protect our skin, vision, bones and many more….

Our T/shirt that day was “Bob is healthy.”

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The birthplace of the Dashehari mango

Our dear friend and colleague Bhuwon Sthapit has prepared this post for us with input from Dr H. Ravishankar, Dr BMC Reddy, Dr S Rajan and farming communities. Thanks, everyone!

‘Dashehari’ is one of the most popular mango varieties of North India, widely acclaimed for its exquisite taste and pleasant aroma. It is also my favorite. Naturally, I was excited to visit the Dashehari Village in Malihabad where the 200 years-old mother tree of the variety, a cultural heritage of the community, still lives.

It is believed that the trees on 80% of the area covered by mango in northern India can be genetically traced back to this very tree. The heritage is exciting, but the risks resulting from massive uniformity of orchards and lack of home gardens to harbour other interesting types of mangoes are terrifying.

Legend has it that a Pathan of Khalispur village of Malihabad Tehsil, transporting choicest mangoes for trade, happened to halt for rest in a hut of a poor Momedian, a monk. The Momedian helped travelers by offering water and shelter and the travelers reciprocated with ripe mangoes.

At the time of departure, the Pathan and the monk had an argument. In a fit of rage, the Pathan shoved one of his choicest ripe mangoes into the soil instead of gifting it to the monk, who however maintained the utmost calm and restraint. In the ensuing rainy season, a mango sapling emerged from the spot, which was duly nurtured to a robust tree by the Momedian. After about twelve years, the tree profusely flowered and yielded fruits of excellent quality.

The news of this unique mango reached the Nawab who owned the land. Being aware of the importance of genetic wealth, he took due care to protect and conserve this exquisite mango variety, which later became the popular ‘Dashehari’ variety of North India.

The tree is still very healthy and impressive, about 10m tall, having a mean canopy spread of 21.0 m and a trunk circumference of about 3.0 m (see picture 1).

The tree has a robust trunk with twelve main scaffolding branches originating and radiating at 1.5 m height almost parallel to the ground.

The tree has spreading canopy architecture with impressive fruiting at the time of the visit, completely overshadowing neighboring trees.

A scientist from the Central Institute of Sub-tropical Horticulture in Lucknow told me that fruits of this Dashehari tree are oblong, elliptical and medium size (13cm long and 8 cm breadth) weighing 130 to 260 g.

It has attractive yellow pulp, firm and non-fibrous, with very sweet taste (researchers told me that it has oBrix score of 21-23 as measure of sweetness in fruits) and pleasant aroma. CISH collected scion material of the tree for clonal propagation in 1977 and thereafter elite clones spread to northern Indian farmers from a network of private and government nurseries.

This cultural heritage tree belonged to the great-grandfather (Mr Ishtida Hussain) of farmer Mr Shamir Zaidi, now 30 years old, who has named his house in honour of the variety — Dashehari Kothi. Mr Kamil Khan, an 87 years old but rather progressive orchardist of the small hamlet of Kakori (close to Dusseheri village) of Malihabad Tehsil shared local legends with the visitors. He told us that the tree, under natural care, is free from stemborer and termites attacks, both common problems of mangoes. It is also free from Loranthus infestation. This tree has yielded on an average 80-190 kg in the last eight years, with a moderate biennial bearing habit.

In September 2009 the area was registered with Geographical Indication No 125 in the name of “Mango Malihabad Dusseheri” by India’s Geographical Indication Registry. The communities around the mother tree have also been selected for the UNEP/GEF Project “Conservation and sustainable use of wild and cultivated fruit tree diversity: Prompting sustainable livelihoods, food security and ecosystems services” in Malihabad, Lucknow. Communties such as Sarsanda, Kasmandi Kalam and Mohammad Nagar Talukedari have 7-29 cultivated varieties each.

They are also blessed by rich diversity in seedling mango trees, with an estimated population of 3000 to 5000 mango seedling trees. Almost all current commercial mango varieties in India are selected from the seedling population. Potentially research can identify many more consumer- and farmer- preferred diversity of mangoes and innovative farmers can work together with researchers and nurserymen to identify, select and popularize the elite materials from existing farmer’s orchards. The project aims to empower farming communities and local institutions to identify unique varieties from the orchards and scale up genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge for sharing wider benefits to farmers and consumers.

Almost all orchards in Malihabad are dominated by Dashehari (80%), with over 10-20 varieties of other cultivated types, but few trees of each. Around the orchards farmer maintain many seedling types and all of these trees produce diverse fruits with diverse shape, size, color and taste. There is thus scope to increase diversity in the market by sharing information with consumers in urban areas to stimulate demand for other varieties there, and thus minimize the risks posed by uniformity while also providing livelihood security for mango growers.

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Nibbles: Microlivestock, Urban ag, Ag info, School meals in Peru, Agrobiodiversity indicators, Nature special supplement, Extension, Breeding organic, Forgetting fish in China, Deforestation, Russian potatoes, Fijian traditional knowledge, Megaprogrammes

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Early farmers got high on chickpeas?

ResearchBlogging.orgA somewhat cryptic comment a few days ago on a year-old post on domestication eventually led us to an intriguing 2007 article in The Times which we unaccountably seem to have missed the first time around. The article quotes liberally from a Journal of Archaeological Science paper which puts forward something of an unorthodox take on chickpea domestication. ((KEREM, Z., LEVYADUN, S., GOPHER, A., WEINBERG, P., & ABBO, S. (2007). Chickpea domestication in the Neolithic Levant through the nutritional perspective Journal of Archaeological Science, 34 (8), 1289-1293 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2006.10.025))

The authors, from various Israeli institutions, start by saying that chickpea is an unusual member of the “founder package” of Middle Eastern crops, which also includes diploid einkorn wheat, tetraploid emmer wheat, barley, pea, lentil and bitter vetch. That’s because its wild precursor (Cicer reticulatum), unlike those of the other first crops, has a relatively narrow distribution and an indehiscent pod (that is, the pods don’t split open when the seeds are ripe), and the crop itself is grown in the summer rather than the winter, basically to escape the fungal disease Ascochyta blight. A rare precursor and a problematic agronomy: why bother with the damn thing? There must have been something special — or at least different — driving the domestication of chickpea. That something, according to the authors, is the amino acid tryptophan.

Free tryptophan levels are an average of three times higher in seeds of cultivated chickpeas compared to their wild precursor, but with a lot of variation among cultivars. The usual sorts of processing have no effect. The levels are such that the authors are able to suggest that “consuming domesticated chickpea will elevate the levels of tryptophan available for processes other than growth and maintenance.” What processes might these be?

Tryptophan is a precursor of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. More tryptophan in the diet means more tryptophan in the blood which means more serotonin in the brain, which has a whole suite of interesting effects. Apart from a feeling of satiety, these include higher ovulation rates in women, improved performance under stress, lowering of aggression and greater receptivity.

So the authors are suggesting that early farming communities consuming wild chickpeas would have been more fertile, less hungry, less depressed, more accepting of social complexity, more innovative and more self-confident. Sounds like I should be eating more chickpeas. Anyway, recognizing the effect that eating these wonder grains had on their mood — and farm animals are apparently able to recognize high tryptophan feeds — early farmers would have selected for ever higher levels, leading to the domestication of the species: “it seems that the inclusion of chickpea in the founder crop package is best understood in light of its high nutritional seed properties.”

Well, it’s a great story, and I really hope it turns out to be true, although I’m not entirely sure how one might further test the hypothesis. Shades of the tale of the domestication of coffee. But I think it might be worth revisiting that initial assumption. Is chickpea really all that different from the other members of the founder package? The distribution of its precursor is certainly limited compared to some of the cereals (the map is courtesy of GBIF).

But wild lentils are not exactly common, and much more inconspicuous. And anyway we don’t really know what the distribution of C. reticulatum was like in the Neolithic. Its pollen doesn’t turn up in cores, according to one expert I asked, so it’s going to be difficult to reconstruct its ancient distribution and frequency. And why should seed indehiscence make chickpea a poor candidate for domestication? Wouldn’t it have been just the opposite? What about tryptophan levels in the other early legumes? And finally, as suggested by a former legume breeder I consulted, was Ascochyta blight a problem in the Neolithic? And is C. reticulatum susceptible to it anyway?

It does seem that perhaps the authors may have erected a bit of a straw man, which they then attacked with a very ingenious, utterly plausible, but ultimately unnecessary argument. But that’s not going to stop me eating my pasta e ceci a bit more often than before I read this paper.

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Why the sorghum crop failed in Kongwa — it’s not what you think

ResearchBlogging.orgThe average agricultural research paper describes some kind of formal experiment, whether in the lab or the research station or even farmers’ fields, and that is as it should be. To know if something really works, you need to be able to keep everything else the same. But there are experiments going on all the time out there, in real life, if you but know how to look. There is surely room in the scientific literature for more of the kind of case study reported in a recent paper in Food Security entitled “The underlying cause of the 2009 sorghum failure in Kongwa district and its implications for Tanzania’s vulnerability to climate change.” ((Page, S., Karanja, D., Mbwaga, A., Letayo, E., & Nsemwa, L. (2010). The underlying cause of the 2009 sorghum failure in Kongwa district and its implications for Tanzania’s vulnerability to climate change Food Security DOI: 10.1007/s12571-010-0059-2))

Through a series of in-depth household and farm surveys the authors seem to have been able to identify the reason why the sorghum crop failed in Kongwa in 2009, and use that information to make general recommendations about what should be done to prevent this happening again in the future, not just in that area but elsewhere in Tanzania.

So let’s set the scene. People in Kongwa are poor, most living on less than $1 a day. They are on the edge of subsistence. They used to grow mainly maize, increasing the area of sorghum when the early rains were poor. Since about 2003, however, sorghum has been the main crop. They grow a suite of local sorghum landraces called Lugugu: long-duration, good-tasting and hard-grained, which means they can be stored for a long time if need be. They also have access to three improved open-pollinated varieties from ICRISAT ((Released in 1986, 1995 and 1999 — why nothing since, one is tempted to ask.)): shorter-duration, which means they can cope with drought, but softer and thus more susceptible to storage pests, and also prey to the parasitic herb Striga. But then there are two Striga-resistant varieties on the market, bred by World Food Prize winner Gebisa Ejeta and released in Tanzania in 2002. Often, the early varieties are grown as a cash crop, sold to buy maize, which is the preferred food still.

In 2009 the rains started badly, and farmers were encouraged by local politicians, in their inimitable way, to “plant drought-resistant crops.” Of course they did, as they would have done anyway, but crop production was nevertheless below requirement. Why?

In fact, it seems that overall the rains, although relatively poor, should have been more than enough for the short-duration varieties. Problem was, there was no seed of these varieties at the optimum time for planting them. And when it finally arrived, too late to take advantage of what early rain there was, it was infected with Covered Kernel Smut. There was no seed at all of the Striga-resistant varieties in the area.

This is not a new problem. Shortage of improved sorghum seed was identified as a constraint as far back as 1987. But none of the village-based seed production projects that have been carried out has had much of an impact, clearly. At least not after the donor funding ceased. And, unfortunately

…the Government of Tanzania has actively discouraged farmers from conserving local sorghum landraces and this has resulted in increasing dependence on so-called improved varieties and is a long term threat to household food security.

Actively discouraged from keeping their long-duration but storable varieties; actively encouraged to plant new varieties that are more drought-tolerant, sure, but can’t be stored, cost money that they don’t have and whose seed is not available anyhow, or at least not in time. Who’d be a Tanzanian farmer?

Now, it seems that “the short rainy season that characterised the 2008–09
cropping season may become the norm,” so some answers need to be found. Better water management is one. And improvement of local seed storage practices. Also,

…attention should be paid to conserving indigenous landraces and breeding improved short season varieties that can be stored for longer periods using traditional, on-farm practices, as this would reduce the need for expensive and unsustainable external seed multiplication systems.

And, I would add, perhaps look into the feasibility of push-pull control measures for Striga.

But mostly the study seems to me a damning indictment of the existing seed system, and of it’s seeming lack of integration with the breeding sector. What good is breeding those “improved short season varieties that can be stored for longer periods using traditional, on-farm practices” if they don’t get to the farmers in time? Indeed, why has storability not been a breeding objective? Well, perhaps it has, and weevil-resistant stuff is on the way. But will it ever get to the farmers?

Now, talk of an integrated germplasm pipeline — from genebank to breeder to farmer — is all the rage these days, and about time too. The case is only strengthened by studies such as this. You don’t always need a replicated trial to do useful science.