Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
PAGxxi, billed as “The Largest Ag-Genomics Meeting in the World” is off and running in San Diego, with its full complement of social media bells and whistles. I’m quite enjoying the Twitter feed. Not the official one, mind you, which is pretty boring, but there’s a half a dozen or so people (so far) who are taking the hashtag very seriously. I hope they keep it up.
https://twitter.com/plgepts/status/290626742916378624
IITA has a pretty nice video out about controlling Banana Xanthomonas Wilt via genetic modification.
Now, don’t jump to any conclusions, I have nothing against genetic modification of banana. In fact, if you’re going to use genetic modification on anything, bananas should be right up there. No chance of that pesky transgene escaping into the wild, for a start. Although I would like to know how they’re planning to engineer resistance into the dozens of varieties that are important in East Africa. Wait, you mean they’re not going to do that? Just a few, eh?
Well, anyway. My main point is that the video gives no hint at all that, as far as BXW control is concerned at any rate, there are other, perfectly viable, options. And IITA knows this, because it has been involved in the development of a pretty effective, multi-faceted, low-cost, integrated, sustainable strategy for control. One that doesn’t involve the threat of reducing the diversity of the crop.
Of course, it would help if there were similarly nice videos about that. There are factsheets galore, true. Lots of factsheets. But videos? Well, maybe you can get them to work. And anyway they don’t really seem to be aimed at the general audience so clearly targeted by IITA’s vid. How can we make the case that there are occasionally more appropriate, sustainable solutions than GMOs when we can’t even win the battle of the videos?
As usual, it never rains but it pours. Within a few minutes yesterday I was pointed by different sources towards the Forest Map of Europe, Tree species maps for European forests, the Condition of Forests in Europe report, a review of Dynamic Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources in 33 European Countries, and a paper on the Uses of tree saps in northern and eastern parts of Europe. Thinking that there might be something in the air, I did a quick search of my RSS feed, and found another very recent review, Translating conservation genetics into management: Pan-European minimum requirements for dynamic conservation units of forest tree genetic diversity. What’s got into the European forest conservation community? Has ash dieback got them all running scared? And is someone going to put all European forest-related maps together somewhere (eg, Eye on Earth)?
Oh dear, here’s another agrobiodiversity documentation project that we’ve missed. Over the past few years NordGen has been supporting the Norwegian Genetic Resource Centre in describing apple varieties. That much I can make out in the Google translation of the original Norwegian web page describing the project. But not much more than that. For some reason, the translation is much worse than is usually the case. Maybe it’s the technical language. Anyway, I don’t think there are any data online yet, but when they are, they may or may not be integrated into the database of Danish apple varieties that NordGen manages, complete with handy key. Which is also in English.