- I know you’re just dying to see a Social Network Analysis of agricultural research in Malawi.
- Big cheeses say Economic growth alone won’t end hunger.
- Wendell Berry is taking a long-term view of the long-term land “emergency” in the US.
- The heck with food, say Oz ag wonks, let’s farm carbon.
- Hey, why doesn’t somebody do this for Berry go Round? (We’re way too busy.)
Nibbles: Vegetables, UK funding, Oz funding, Oz genebank, Jefferson, Hawaiian food, Markets, Tree seeds, NUS journal, Geographic targeting, ITPGRFA, Arabica and climate, Protected areas, European farmland biodiversity, Sustainable use, Ethiopian seed video
- Palestinian rooftop gardens. Including crucifers, no doubt.
- Brits support work with rice and wheat wild relatives. Among other things. They’ll probably use some of these genomics things.
- Aussies support sweet potatoes. HarvestPlus rejoices.
- That new Australian genebank. Will it have any sweet potatoes?
- The agricultural legacy of Thomas Jefferson. It doesn’t say here, but I bet he was into sweet potato.
- Hawaiian menus. What, no sweet potato?
- Forget biotech, the road to sexy agriculture is via the supermarket. Where you can buy sweet potato. Maybe even of the organic persuasion.
- Or maybe better tree seeds. Even in the Nordic countries. Or the US. Is cacao a tree?
- Plans for special edition of Sustainability on neglected crops. Like amaranth?
- Geographic targeting reaches roots/tubers. Using this newfangled atlas? Or no?
- Treaty and Consortium love-in filmed. Thanks for sharing. It’s all part of this CGIAR perestroika thing, no doubt.
- What that Kew coffee extinction paper really said.
- Protected areas need work. Especially for coffee (see above).
- Yeah but protected areas is not the only way to go, and Europe now has a bunch of biodiversity indicators for farmland. I guess it’s all part of some big plan.
- Policy brief on sustainable use of PGR. Or, as we used to call it, on farm conservation.
- Which you can kind of see happening here.
More than pawns in the game of crop diversity conservation
There’s a program on the History Channel called Pawn Stars. It’s about a high-end but nevertheless slightly seedy family-owned pawn shop in Las Vegas, and the motley assortment of customers who come through its doors, hoping to trade their property for cash. I’ve developed something of an addiction to this show lately, and family and friends were sufficiently concerned to mount an intervention. Confronted with the truth, I had to think fast. I watch it for work reasons, I improvised. Pawn shops are just like genebanks.
Panicked or not, I may have been onto something. The wonderful thing about pawn shops is that they deal in all manner of weird and unusual stuff. Each item is brought in by someone who has some kind of story about it, needs to be evaluated by an expert, and will eventually catch the fancy of someone else. Just like genebanks. Genebanks typically keep seeds of dozens of different species, and sometimes hundreds if not thousands of different varieties of each. Each lot of seeds has a story – a story about how it got to be what it is, often thanks to generations of farmers –- encoded in its DNA. It was brought into the genebank by someone who more often than not has an interesting story to tell about how they got it. It needs to be taken care of in a particular way, depending on what it is, and its characteristics described. And it will be taken out by someone who needs it because of those characteristics, and will make good use of it, in a breeding programme, or because they remember their grandparents growing it.
Trying to explain what genebanks do can call forth many metaphors. All fall painfully short in some way. Banks only have money. Different currencies, maybe, and different kinds of accounts, but it’s all boring old money in the end. Only you have access to what you put into a safe deposit box. 1 Customers don’t take things into department stores. Museums do have lots of different things in them, but visitors can’t take them out. No genebank manager wants their charge to be described as just a museum. Some people call genebanks morgues, and while that may occasionally be a bit true, it’s just plain rude.
The parallel for pawn shops is better than all these, I think. But it’s not perfect. The idea of pawning the crown jewels, another metaphor that’s sometimes used for genebanks, at least within the CGIAR, is not, ahem, attractive. Anyway, genebanks don’t buy and sell; though maybe they should sometimes. And they deal in resources that are pretty special in being non-exclusive and renewable. Just because you’ve used a particular variety doesn’t mean nobody else can. And if the genebank is careful, it can always make more seeds.
Which in the end is why none of the comparisons is really satisfactory. A genebank is a genebank is a genebank. There’s no substitute for walking into a cold store full of thousands of jars of different varieties of seeds, neatly arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelving, carefully labelled. Or listening to the people in charge of some of the largest genebanks in the world explain their visions, as I’m doing this week. But if you want to see why some people get a thrill when they do that, can’t be in Rome this week, and can’t wait for Genebank Gods to come along on the History Channel, watch Pawn Stars. Just don’t let your family catch you.
Nibbles: AIRCA lives, Graft mangos, Breed forage, Discuss seed laws, Overfish
Apologies for the lack of service; we’re a bit all over the map.
- The Association of International Research and Development Centres for Agriculture (AIRCA) comes a step closer. Smallholder farmers rejoice.
- Side grafting and informal scion exchange for fun and profit. Smallholder mango farmers rejoice.
- Annals of botany highlights strategies for forage and grass improvement. Forage breeders and livestock rejoice.
- European NGOs discuss non-paper on revision to seed legislation. Eurocrats see no reason to rejoice.
- German development agency goes large on small fish stocks, with added political goodness. Fisherfolk see no reason to rejoice either.
Taro in the Levant
I was reminded during a recent trip back to Cyprus (my first visit in 20 years after living there for quite a while) of the curious fact that taro is a staple of traditional Cypriot cuisine, something of an outlier in the Mediterranean. Called kolokassi, the tuber is prepared in a number of ways, and the young offshoots, or suckers, are also taken fried. You can see these in the photo, labelled “poulles.”. Peter J. Matthews has this to say in his “Genetic Diversity in Taro, and the Preservation of Culinary Knowledge“:
In Cyprus only one cultivar of taro is grown, but there are at least nine distinct ways of preparing taro (skhara, vrasto, souppa skourdalia, tiganites, kappamas, yiakhni, psito, moussakas, Matthews 1998a) (Figure 4). The fermentation of taro starch, and the edibility of leaves (petioles and blades) are not known in Cyprus. All the methods recorded use heat to reduce acridity — by simmering, boiling, stewing, frying, roasting, grilling, and baking (steaming was not reported). For each named dish, the details of preparation varied from person to person and village to village. The range of dishes is not large, compared to the range in Japan (Matthews 1995), but does involve a greater range of methods for applying heat.
You can find out more in the book “The Global Diversity of Taro: Ethnobotany and Conservation,” in which Dr Matthews has also had a hand. Poulles are not mentioned, which makes me think their consumption may be a relatively recent innovation.
It’s not clear where that one Cypriot cultivar may have come from, though Matthews says that the crop “is likely to have reached Cyprus in ancient times from India or Africa, via the Levant or Egypt.” That makes sense, but will be difficult to verify, as there is precious little in the way of germplasm collections in the region between Europe and India. I would imagine Egypt in particular would be fertile territory for a bit of collecting. I wasn’t able to find any ancient Egyptians representations of the plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they exist.