Category: Mainstream

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A wild bunch of almonds

Never rains but it pours. Along very similar lines as the previous post on a fun effort to document people’s favourite breadfruit varieties, here comes the FruitDev project’s Wild Fruit Population of the Month.

Each month, the series highlights one (or more) populations identified by a FRUITDIV partner, illustrating how field exploration, local knowledge, and cross-partner collaboration contribute to a better understanding of wild fruit genetic resources.

By focusing on individual populations, the series aims to make visible the often-overlooked genetic diversity found in natural and semi-natural landscapes, many of which are shaped by environmental pressures such as drought, poor soils, or past disturbances. These populations represent valuable reservoirs of adaptive traits that are increasingly relevant for resilience, conservation, and future breeding strategies.

This month’s featured population is a dwarf almond from North Macedonia. Nice idea.

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Nibbles: Fit for Biodiversity, Food value chains, FAO, SeedTracker, Morocco genetic erosion, Pastoralists, Cannabis seedbanks

  1. A conference on biodiversity in agri-food systems. Including agrobiodiversity?
  2. A photo essay about food value chains in India. Including agrobiodiversity?
  3. A few examples of FAO’s work on how agriculture sustains biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
  4. An app to track seeds. And therefore agrobiodiversity.
  5. A warning that 75% of the agrobiodiversity of Morocco’s wheat and barley has been lost in the past 50 years. Ah, so that 75% number is true of something after all. Maybe they could use SeedTracker.
  6. A reminder that pastoralists guard biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
  7. A Genesys for weed. Well, I guess it’s agrobiodiversity.
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Nibbles: Svalbard prize, Rice breeding, Coffee geography, Biodiversity loss monitoring, Spatial data

  1. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault gets the Princesa de Asturias Prize for international cooperation. Time to celebrate.
  2. Celebrating Pamela Ronald and scuba rice.
  3. Celebrating Ohsoon Yun and the geography of coffee.
  4. I’ll certainly celebrate if the approach of the NATURE-FIRST project can be applied to loss of agricultural biodiversity one day.
  5. The World Bank is in a celebratory mood with regards to geospatial and Earth observation data. I’ll join them when they fund a NATURE-FIRST for crop diversity.
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Humble crop beats superfood

Two articles about the contrasting fortunes of Andean crops came out last week. They describe different sides of the same broad story: Indigenous agricultural systems are highly biodiverse and increasingly positioned as climate adaptation strategies, but they are also under pressure.

In Peru, potato farmers in places like the Parque de la Papa are actively conserving thousands of native potato varieties as a form of insurance. This is climate change adaptation: maintaining agrobiodiversity, preserving traditional knowledge, and using resilient crop varieties and farming practices to buffer against warming temperatures, erratic rainfall, and pest and disease pressure. The message is that crop diversity itself is a survival strategy, both ecological and cultural.

The recent history of quinoa in Bolivia shows the same system under a different kind of stress: global demand drove a commodity boom that incentivized monoculture expansion and mechanization, which in turn contributed to soil degradation, erosion and reduced resilience. Coming back from that is proving difficult.

Together, the two cases show that when Indigenous agroecosystems are treated as living repositories of diversity, they can enhance resilience, including to climate change; and that when they are pulled into boom-driven export specialization, that resilience can be undermined. The shared lesson, at least for me, is that climate adaptation in mountain agriculture depends on maintaining ecological and genetic diversity embedded in Indigenous land management systems.

A point that I suspect is highlighted in the book Andean Potatoes and Quinoa: Origin, Current Status and Recipes of Ancestral Crops, also recently announced.