Hot on the heels of our concerns about carbon sequestration, biofuels, biochar, EGS and all that malarkey, The Economist has a special issue this week on Alternative Energy. ((Not sure how much of it is available to non-subscribers; if that link doesn’t work, please let me know.)) And what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Nibbles: Bananas, Wheat, Cameroon, Bees, Eden, Millennium Villages, Organic, Yam, Ag origins, Apricots
- Compare and contrast the banana and the Big Mac. Dan Koeppel takes it to the masses.
- Lamenting the loss of “amber waves of grain”. Ingrate.
- Cameroon’s agriculture vulnerable to climate change. I’ll alert the media.
- Look what I got you for National Pollinator Week next week; a World Checklist of Bees. Neat-o.
- Celebrate food and farmers in Eden.
- “The core of the strategy is a short-term provision of improved seeds suited to the local environment and fertilizers like Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP) and urea accompanied by advice on how to use them.” Sounds familiar…
- Meanwhile, in non-Millennium Villages: “While his maize cobs were smaller than others, the seed was of a much higher quality; the fibre of his cotton was also much longer.”
- Japanese yam fields in peril. Yams as in Dioscorea or sweet potato or what? So annoying.
- Neolithic myths?
- California apricot grower explores Central Asia, comes up trumps. Jeremy comments: CandyCots? I think I want to be sick.
Livestock policies come alive
Our friends at Wrenmedia, who are responsible, among other things, for New Agriculturalist, have recently branched out into moving pictures. A series of presentations accompany an FAO project on pro-poor livestock policy and institutional change. They’re up on Youtube; here’s the one on Burkina Faso:
Maybe they’ll be tempted to enter something in The Competition?
Fire threatens wild gourd…or maybe not
I’m ashamed to say that all Seminole names look alike to me. I know it’s a failing, and I’m trying to correct it. But, in the meantime, I could not help but be somewhat alarmed when I saw that a brush fire had destroyed a chunk of Okaloacoochee State Forest in Florida. That’s because I vaguely remembered a wild Cucurbita, endemic to Florida, with a very similar specific epithet. Well, it turned out to be an object lesson in the perils, and occasional advantages, of ignorance.
The wild cucurbit is actually Cucurbita okeechobeensis. And that’s the perils part, as “okeechobee” is actually not much like “okaloacoochee.” Pretty embarassing to confuse the two. But gbiffing Cucurbita okeechobeensis, and comparing its distribution with the location of Okaloacoochee State Forest, reveals the advantages part. For it turns out that Okeechobee gourd could well be found in or around the ravaged state forest (blue dots). It’s possible, anyway.
So a little learning can be a useful thing.
Now, I have no idea whether that brush fire actually destroyed, or even threatened, populations of this particular crop wild relative. Maybe someone will tell me. But the point I would like to make is that it would be nice to have a system whereby the locations of threats like fires, floods, new roads etc. could be automatically compared to a dataset of the distribution of crop wild relatives. Globally.
I don’t think technology is a problem. I did the whole thing in Google Earth. The bottleneck is a comprehensive global dataset of the locations (actual or predicted) of populations of crop wild relatives. Hopefully that’s what the CWR Portal will become in time.
Frazer Bule Lehi
My friend Frazer Bule passed away last Saturday. He was head of agricultural research in Vanuatu and one of the most knowledgeable and experienced genetic resources scientists in the Pacific. I first met him in 1985 when we spent some hours in a forest clearing on Espiritu Santo characterizing taro with Grahame Jackson. He was a great person. That’s him on the left below, buying kava for a bunch of us a few years ago in Port Vila. He’ll be much missed, not least by me.
