- No new salinity tolerance in cereals? You need to look at the right thing.
- No new crops? Focus on plants’ sex lives.
- No hope for drylands? Look to biodiversity.
- No new agricultural land? No problem.
- No data on neglected Himalayan crops? Got you covered.
- No way you’re drinking coffee from civet droppings? Chemistry to the rescue.
- No place for the offspring of F1 hybrids in your agriculture? Go apomictic.
- No new fruits left to try? Hang in there.
- No diversity in your Aragonese homegarden? There’s a genebank for that.
- No impact for your agricultural research. Try clusters.
- No agroecological patterning to your crop’s genetic diversity? It’s the culture, stupid.
Documenting geographical origins of Indian products
Ever realised that the famous, red hot Naga Mirchi (a special variety of chilli from Nagaland) doesn’t have a Wikipedia page?
Well, no, as it happens, but in any case that’s apparently about to change. According to an article in The Hindu, there’s something called an edit-a-thon going on right now that will provide wikipedia pages for Indian products which have been registered for geographical indication (GI). Quite a few other agricultural products are slated for inclusion apart from that notorious Nagaland pepper. Navara rice from Kerala caught my eye. There’s a specimen at IRRI labelled with that name. Also Bhalia wheat from Gujarat. Which unfortunately, in contrast to Navara rice, Genesys drew a blank on. An earlier article in The Hindu gives an alternative appellation, Daudkhani. That name is associated with an accession in the CIMMYT genebank. But that’s from Pakistan.
Nibbles: Value edition
- Peru to give value to its biodiversity.
- Germany already has, 500 years ago.
- Cavendish bananas have a lot of value, but that won’t save them.
- The UK’s vegetables genebank is very valuable.
- But you can always add more value to genebank collections if you evaluate them, like IRRI’s going to do in an expensive new building.
- I’m not sure what the value of Gold Rush-era heritage trees might be, but I think it’s really cool that someone’s looking for them.
- The value of genetic engineering for drought tolerance is just around the corner.
Markets everywhere
Two huge data analysis papers from CGIAR centres and assorted partners came out recently. As far as I can see, the work was done independently of each other, and the teams looked at distinct, though related, aspects of smallholder agriculture in Africa. But, intriguingly, the results pointed in the same direction.
The first paper 1 was led by Mark van Wijk, a scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and looked at a “unique dataset covering land use and production data by more than 13,000 smallholder farm households in 93 sites in 17 countries across sub-Saharan Africa.” What determined the food security of these households? The second bit of research was led by Louise Sperling while working with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). 2 She’s now a Senior Technical Adviser at Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The paper “examined some 10,000 seed transactions across five African countries and Haiti.” Where did smallholders get their seeds from?
The answer to both questions was: markets. You want seeds? You need the local market.
…farmers access 90.2% of their seed from informal systems with 50.9% of that deriving from local markets.
You want food security? You need the local market.
Farm households sell produce even when they do not produce enough food to be self-sufficient: 83% of the farm household sell part of their crop produce, and only 4% of the farmers do not sell anything of their crop or livestock produce. Thus, market access is crucial to ensure or improve the livelihoods of these families.
Very interesting in its own right, of course. And much more data of this sort are needed. But one does wonder how many more household-level datasets of this type are out there in CGIAR vaults that could inform each other’s analysis. Or indeed whether there might have been value added to gathering the seed and food security (and other?) data together in the first place.
Nibbles: Gastronomy edition
- Gastronomy comes to the Amazon.
- Maybe it should come to Tikal too.
- You know it’s already in Mexico.
- Not to mention Peru.
- Preparing decent coffee counts as gastronomy, I guess. But SL28 is not genetically engineered. Not in the usual sense, anyway.
- Not sure that eels have much of a future in gastronomy.
- Into Africa: Indian seeds. And Indian gastronomy along with them?
- Feralization is not domestication in reverse. Lots of gastronomic potential, though.
- Meanwhile…