Information

February 6, 2017

Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity series

An important announcement from Danny Hunter and Michael Halewood of Bioversity.

Since publication of the first book back in 2010 the ‘Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity’ series has grown steadily. We continue to receive encouraging feedback and it is clear that for many in the agrobiodiversity community it is one of the ‘go to’ sources for information. As we move into 2017, we now have our tenth book title in the pipeline and we are hopeful it will be published later in the year to mark this landmark achievement. Ten titles in any book series is a reasonable achievement. But we don’t want to stop there. We want for the series to continue to grow and especially to expand its scope to other still neglected (from the series perspective) elements of agrobiodiversity, including new titles which demonstrate and explore more interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches to the topic and which have much resonance in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.

The series is a partnership between Bioversity International and Earthscan from Routledge. One of the advantages of publishing in the series through this partnership is we have an agreement that all books become freely available and open access after 9 months in hard copy.

With the beginning of a new year we would like to renew our call for new proposals. We are interested in proposals which address gaps in the current list of titles and are innovative in scope. These could address the following topics but we are open to all relevant and reasonable suggestions:

Agrobiodiversity and climate change
Agrobiodiversity and nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions
Wild foods, seasonality and food security
Livestock and animal genetic resources
Fish, aquatic genetic resources
Soil biodiversity
Forests and tree genetic resources and non-timber forest products
Diverse agricultural systems, biodiversity and ecosystem services
Indigenous Peoples/Indigenous knowledge systems and agricultural biodiversity
Agrobiodiversity, human health and wellbeing
Agrobiodiversity, policy, access and benefit sharing
Promoting diversity in food systems: Interdisciplinary and cross sectoral approaches
Biodiversity, food cultures, gastronomy movements and sustainable food tourism
Diversifying food procurement and school feeding, sustainable and healthy food sourcing
Agrobiodiversity and sustainable consumption
Markets for diverse species
Agrobiodiversity and short supply chains
Innovative planning and policies for agrobiodiversity-rich sustainable food systems
Gender and agricultural biodiversity
Urban-rural, city-regions and the role of agricultural biodiversity
Agrobiodiversity and integrated landscape approaches

We warmly welcome your suggestions. If you have any questions just drop us a line. Finally, please do share this call as widely as possibly with your networks, colleagues and friends.

For anyone seeking further information please contact Danny Hunter (d_DOT_hunter_AT_cgiar_DOT_org) or Michael Halewood (m_DOT_halewood_AT_cgiar_DOT_org) at Bioversity International.

February 2, 2017

Nibbles: Coffee & chocolate redux, American Indian food, Crop seed size, Oca breeding club, Black chicken, Deadly lychees, Arctic potatoes, Eat this animal-derived food

Genetics will save coffee.
And probably chocolate too, but not alone: new podcast from Simran Sethi.
Must be catching.
Native American foodways get a resource guide.
Cultivated plants have larger seeds than wild relatives. Well I never.
Wanna breed oca?
A chicken after my own black heart.
Even tasty fruits can be deadly.
Commonwealth Potato Collection goes to Svalbard.
Got milk! Jeremy’s latest pod.

January 30, 2017January 20, 2017

Brainfood: Wheat elements, Coconut movement, Wild lettuce, Pacific yams, Wild VIR oats, PREDICTS, Potato leaves, Perennial wheat, Wheat adoption

Genetic Nature of Elemental Contents in Wheat Grains and Its Genomic Prediction: Toward the Effective Use of Wheat Landraces from Afghanistan. Only one significant marker, for Zn.
Strategies for exchange of coconut germplasm in Brazil. Zygotic embryos in Petri dish containing Y3 culture medium without sucrose can last a couple of days without bacterial infection.
Phylogenetic relationships within Lactuca L. (Asteraceae), including African species, based on chloroplast DNA sequence comparisons. The African species are probably not Lactuca at all.
The Pacific yam (Dioscorea nummularia Lam.), an under-exploited tuber crop from Melanesia. It can be improved through crossing with itself, or with other species.
Eco-geographical assessment of Avena L. wild species at the VIR herbarium and genebank collection. Some more collecting to be done.
The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project. Including 15,000 plants. No word on whether any of them Avena.
Your Poison in My Pie—the Use of Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Leaves in Sakartvelo, Republic of Georgia, Caucasus, and Gollobordo, Eastern Albania. Only used as first vegetable in spring in isolated high mountain areas in the southern Balkans.
Toward a taxonomic definition of perennial wheat: a new species ×Tritipyrum aaseae described. Not entirely clear why naming it as a new species is necessary, but it’s still pretty cool.
Dynamics of variety change on wheat farms in Pakistan: A duration analysis. For marginal farmers, it’s about yield, for others, quality. No word on how perennial wheat might do.

January 28, 2017January 27, 2017

Filipino rice landraces documented

Congratulations to all concerned for the launch of the catalogue of Philippine Traditional Rice Varieties. I’m reliably informed it will be available online soon. In the meantime, I’ve had the privilege of consulting a PDF, and I can confirm that it is really as cool as it sounds.

January 26, 2017

Coconut history 101

Coconut expert Hugh Harries has sent us this comment on the recent article in AramcoWord entitled Cracking Coconut’s History, by Ramin Ganeshram.

Amusingly illustrated and attractively written, in this article Ramin Ganeshram records that in the last few years coconut production, export and processing have become a multibillion-dollar global industry. In fact, coconut was global from the 1860s to the 1960s. It was the leading vegetable oil on international markets for the best part of a century.

Ramin does not mention Polynesians or the Pacific Ocean, but to them the coconut was more than a source of income. It was the life-support system that ensured their extraordinary survival in locations where coconut palms are routinely decimated by hurricanes and tsunamis or simply washed away by rising sea levels.

The article is not quite up to date as a history, even though Ramin refers to the genetic testing underwritten by the National Geographic Society in 2011. This confirmed that today’s cultivated coconut originated in India and Southeast Asia but, surprisingly, claimed it was taken by boat to the Pacific coast of America more than 2,000 years ago. Yet coconuts would not survive since then without cultivation to control weeds and pests or recover from natural disaster.

There is a general consensus coconuts grow very well on coral atolls but an equally general disagreement as to whether they were dispersed to remote islands by floating and were capable of self establishment, or if not, were carried by boat and planted where they could not float.

This is most clearly recognised where they were introduced in Central America and the Caribbean in the mid 16th century. Indian or East African coconuts carried by Portuguese boats into the Atlantic reached Brazil and Puerto Rico by the 1550s. At much the same time, Southeast Asian coconuts were taken by the first Spanish mariners who found the the Manila-Acapulco route in 1565.

It was only when the Panama canal opened 100 years ago that the differences between the two contrasting types were recognised when those from the Pacific coast were imported to Jamaica for replanting areas devastated by hurricanes.

My thanks to Ramin Ganeshram for giving me the opportunity to add some information that I hope will be useful when a revised second edition of this history is prepared.