Category: Mainstream

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Legume to remove nitrogen

Soybean field I’m still trying to get my head round this one. USDA scientists are developing a soybean variety (which they stress is not genetically modified) bred to remove nitrogen from the land.

The variety does not develop nodules, the little bumps on the root that house nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Now those nitrogen-fixing bacteria are one of the best reasons to plant legumes, because they boost soil fertility. Why would you want a legume that did not? So that animal producers could use it to solve their waste problem. I expect it makes sense in the hyper-specialized world that the USDA serves but, as I said, I’m having a little trouble with the idea.

Photo of soybean field courtesy of USDA.

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Oil palms and diversity

It is an article of faith that intensive monocultures of genetically uniform plants are bad for biodiversity, wild and agricultural. So news that Malaysia is putting some money into a “Palm Oil Wildlife Conservation Fund to promote ideas and proposals to enhance biodiversity linked to palm oil production worldwide” is welcome. The fund will seek to promote sustainable practices and to make more use of the production of palm oil plantations, in addition to boosting biodiversity in and around plantations. There’s also talk of using palm oil to produce biofuels, a hot topic at the CGIAR Annual General Meeting.

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Google Earth

I’ll be posting later this week about the importance of geo-tagging biodiversity, but for now I just wanted to point out that Google Earth Blog, an independent forum for the discussion of the things you can do with Google Earth, has a section on the environment. Many of the things Frank Taylor posts on under this tag will be relevant to the study and conservation of biodiversity. And here’s a great Google Earth application I’ve recently come across, though from another source. The Malaria Atlas Project is pulling together data on the global distribution of the malaria parasites as a prelude to modelling their spatial limits.

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Green Revolution did not bypass Africa; it failed

Grain, an international NGO that “promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity” has issued a somewhat jaundiced review of the recent anouncement by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation of a new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Grain insists that the first Green Revolution did not bypass Africa: “It failed. It was unpopular and ineffective.”  The NGO goes on to say that on the evidence available, the new effort will fail for the same reasons, because the approach it adopts is unchanged.

What do you think? Do African farmers need new technology, such as improved varieties and fertilisers? Or are there other approaches that will help societies there to develop and feed themselves more effectively?

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Pouring money into climate change

The Guardian in the UK reports on a new plan to tackle climate change and agriculture, to be launched today in Washington DC. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research will spend about UD 400 million a year “to help agricultural experts develop crops that can withstand heat and drought, find more efficient farming techniques and make better use of increasingly fragile soil and scarce water supplies,” according to the paper. Robert Ziegler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute, one of the CGIAR centres, did not specifically mention agrobiological diversity, but it is safe to say that the kinds of developments envisaged by the CGIAR will not be possible without making considerable use of existing biodiversity.

Later … there are CGIAR press releases here and here that give an official view.