Too much fun to save for the New Year.
Make of this what you will, hidden-message-wise. Just because I found it on Paul Krugman’s blog doesn’t signify anything.
Farming in Eastern Ethiopia
The Guardian has a slideshow on small-scale farming in Ethiopia, mostly showcasing the Wrold Food Programme’s Meret project. Which is great, if it draws attention to the ways in which the Ethiopian people are working to make themselves more food secure. But (and there’s always a but, because we always want more) can you really trust the information in the picture captions? Slide 6, for example; is that really pigeon pea the women are harvesting? Doesn’t look like it to me. And slide 13? The plants shown are said to include “false banana (it looks like a banana tree, but is actually cassava)”.
The pedant will sneer at banana being described as a tree; we’re OK with that. But what is this false banana cassava, “called kobe in Amharic“? 1 Many more sources seem to think “false banana” is ensete (Ensete ventricosum). That makes sense. and quite a few refer to the fermented starchy corms of the plant, called kocho. But of a link to Manihot esculenta, not a sign.
What’s that you say? “Look who’s a pedant now?” You clearly don’t understand our thirst for true knowledge. Someone, somewhere must know for sure whether someone, somewhere, truly calls enset cassava.
Brainfood: Cassava in Colombia, Tubers in Peru, Breadfruit diversity, Hominins and elephants, Evolution, Domestication, Mongolian sheep, Roads, Econutrition, South Asia food composition
- Informal “Seed” Systems and the Management of Gene Flow in Traditional Agroecosystems: The Case of Cassava in Cauca, Colombia. Farmers move cassava around a lot.
- Ecological and socio-cultural factors influencing in situ conservation of crop diversity by traditional Andean households in Peru. Farmers should be supported in moving tubers around more.
- Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. There’s a lot of it.
- Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. Disappearance of elephant led to replacement of Homo erectus. Quite a difference from the more recent hominin-elephant dynamic.
- Fitness consequences of plants growing with siblings: reconciling kin selection, niche partitioning and competitive ability. All agriculture is about reconciling kin selection.
- Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Revisionism rules.
- Tracing genetic differentiation of Chinese Mongolian sheep using microsatellites. Five populations clustered by fancy science into, ahem, five populations.
- Road connectivity, population, and crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fancy science reveals better roads would be good for agriculture. Hell, my mother-in-law could have told them that.
- Econutrition: Preventing Malnutrition with Agrodiversity Interventions. Home gardening is the way to go.
- Carotenoid and retinol composition of South Asian foods commonly consumed in the UK. Palak paneer is not just good, it’s good for you.
Italian rice at IRRI
An article about Italian rice sent me scurrying once again to the International Rice Information System. That suggests, as you can see from the diagram at left if you click on it, that the rice variety Carnaroli is in fact the result of a cross between Vialone and Lencino. Vialone Nano is also mentioned in the article, along with Arborio. You — and no doubt Italian rice farmers — will be pleased to hear that all three varieties are safely conserved in the IRRI genebank.
Mining the minerals in cowpea
In the wake of recent news of successes in biofortifying root and tuber crops like sweet potato and cassava, it is as well to remind ourselves that grains also provide micronutrients, 2 and a paper in Plant Genetic Resources: Characterization and Utilization does a good job of just that for the somewhat neglected cowpea. 3
The authors assessed 1541 accessions from the IITA genebank for the crude protein, Fe, Zn, Ca, Mg, K and P content of the grains. They found fairly wide diversity, but recognized some 9 groups of accessions within which the nutrient profiles were relatively similar. The “best” 50 accessions belonged to only three of these groups, and seven of the best 10 accessions to just one group. While admitting that “increased mineral content in the grains does not guarantee increased nutrient status for the consumer,” they concluded that
…members of some groups such as G5 and G9, which included TVu-2723, TVu-3638 and TVu-2508, would be potential sources of genes for enhancing protein and mineral concentrations in improved cowpea varieties. These lines would therefore be selected and used in crossing for generating segregating populations from where selections can be made for newly developed nutrient-dense cowpea varieties.
It may be the subject of another paper, but what Ousmane Boukar and his co-authors do not do in this one is investigate whether groups G5 and G9, which as I say are based on mineral composition, also hang together morphologically or geographically. Here’s the geographical distribution of the IITA collection, based on data in Genesys (you’ll see it better if you click on it):
The top 10 accessions in fact come from Benin, India (2), Mali, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, the US (3) and Zaire, so the latter is probably unlikely. Unfortunately, only the Mali and Benin accessions are georeferenced, but look at the nighbourhood of one of them, TVu-8810 from Benin, shown here in red:
Worth collecting a bit more around the village of Borgou?