- The CGIAR spatial crowd get it together? Not holding my breath.
- So tell me about that biodiversity-poverty link. Well, more research is, ahem, needed. Wet, for want of a better word.
- All the different kinds of “spots” for livestock diseases. How did they cope with the poor data? And have the various hotspots and coldspots been considered in drawing up the new research priorities for livestock?
- UNDP stumps up $4 million to plan biodiversity management in Romania. Including agrobiodiversity? Not holding my breath.
- A socio-economic impact analysis of cultural diversity in cities does not consider agriculture at all. There’s a PhD there for someone.
- IUCN’s plans for the Iraqi marshes. Thesiger unavailable for comment.
- If it can be done with amphibians, why the hell can’t it be done with agricultural biodiversity?
- Biojoy swamps Bioversity as Biohappiness book is launched.
- Yeah but was there any of this? And if not, why not? Via NWFP-Digest-L.
Safeguarding tangible agricultural heritage
There’s a great set of pictures of Kenyan traditional crops and food preparation on UNESCO’s Facebook page, in their Documenting Living Heritage series. This is part of an exhibition currently on at UNESCO’s HQ in Paris to raise awareness of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. I doubt there’s a photograph of the Gene Bank of Kenya, but that surely contributes to that goal too.
Maize hits the heights
The llama dung story got me thinking about high-altitude maize. Maize is a tropical plant and it would have taken quite a bit of effort to get it adapted to high elevations. This is what Genesys knows about maize around the world:
And this is (in red) where maize collected above 3,500 masl has been collected:
Those Andean agriculturalists obviously did a pretty good job of breeding maize to fit the new environment, and in fact still are.
LATER: As Jacob helpfully points out in a comment on this post, a 2002 paper confirmed, using microsatellites, that Andean maize is genetically quite distinct.
German lentils go back home
Before the introduction of the potato, Irish people included grain as a dietary mainstay, particularly oats. Oats were used in breads, desserts, drinks, medicines and cosmetics! Other grains that were grown included barley, flax, rye and some wheats. Unfortunately, many of these grain varieties were lost and we had to turn, primarily to the Vavilov Institute in Russia, the first genebank in the world, to repatriate our native grains. Michael Miklis in Piltown, Kilkenny, working with very small quantities of grain, over many years trialed them and bulked them up so that they could be resown on field scale again.
That reference to the Vavilov Institute on the Irish Seed Savers website reminded me of something similar they told me about the last time I was there.
Dr Margarita Vishnyaova, the head of the legume department, told me that they had recently “repatriated” some “German” lentils to a farmer cooperative in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The varieties in question are labelled “Späts Alpenlinse” (K2106, collected Hungary in 1965) and “Späths Albinse” (K2076, collected Czechoslovakia in 1963) in VIR’s records. Woldemar Mammel, a farmer from near Stuttgart had apparently been looking for these varieties in databases all over the place and eventually happened on them in the VIR online catalogue. They are old traditional varieties from the Swabian Alps which are no longer grown in Germany, or at least his part of them. The handover of the seed to Herr Mammel and a group of 15 other German organic farmers took place in Nov. 2007 at VIR, and was filmed by Slow Food Deutschland (Prof. Dr Roman Lenz, Dinah Epperlein). There are some photographs of the event on the Slow Food website. Sometimes genebank databases are good for something after all.
Organic breeding conferences
The European Consortium for Organic Plant Breeding (ECO-PB) has announced two up-coming meetings. One is dedicated to the European organic seed regime and the other one is a celebration of ECO-PB’s 10 year anniversary.
The Workshop on Organic Seed Regulation will take place at The Organic Research Centre near Newbury in England on 21-22 September 2011.
The 10-year shindig is scheduled for 3-4 November 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. That one has a call for papers, due by 15 June 2011.
ECO-PB is having a little trouble making the documents available at its website. As a service, here they are.
If you go, consider blogging for us.