Aromatic agrobiodiversity was in the news and the peer-reviewed literature today. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) got a good write-up in ScienceDaily. It turns out that one of chemicals found in its spiky leaves — carnosic acid — can protect the brain from free radicals, but is only activated by the damage caused by these compounds. Otherwise it just sits there doing nothing, which is what you want in a drug. Anyway, there are lots of different varieties of rosemary, and different levels of carnosic acid among them. There are also wild populations in the Mediterranean, as of other herbs as well, and people who make a living harvesting them from the garrigue. That can sometimes be overdone, resulting in damage to the plants, and to the environment, due to increased soil erosion when it rains. So a study from Spain just published in the journal Catena is welcome. It quantified how much harvesting of various aromatic shrubs (lavender, oregano, sage and santolina) you can do before the soil starts to suffer. The recommendation is to leave 50% of the plant biomass in the field.
First International Breadfruit Symposium report
I mentioned the First International Breadfruit Symposium some time back, but then never again. Which made me feel guilty when I got an email from Lois Englberger this morning saying that there’s a report on the meeting in the latest Chronica Horticulturae. But at least now I don’t really have to say anything more about it myself! Nice pictures too.
Hot news from CAPRi
No, that’s not a typo. CAPRi is the CGIAR system-wide program on Collective Action and Property Rights. A little more than a year ago CAPRi organized a workshop on Collective Action and Market Access for Smallholders. Now the papers from that meeting are available online. Two that might be of particular interest to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog readers are:
CAPRi Working Paper No. 69: Collective Action and Marketing of Underutilized Plant Species: The Case of Minor Millets in Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu, India, by Guillaume P. Gruère, Latha Nagarajan, and E.D.I. Oliver King
and
CAPRi Working Paper No. 70: The Role of Public-Private Partnerships and Collective Action in Ensuring Smallholder Participation in High Value Fruit and Vegetable Supply Chains, by Clare Narrod, Devesh Roy, Julius Okello, Belem Avendaño, Karl Rich
Indian government to invest in herbs
The Government of India is apparently about to invest Rs 1,000 crore (which i think is Rs 10,000,000,000, something in excess of US$ 250 million, if I’ve got my decimal points right) in herbal medicines over the next five years. The article notes that:
It is a great irony in a country where households pass herbal remedies from one generation to another, and one village to the next, that India accounts for just about 2% of the global herbal drugs market, which is valued at about $63 billion (about Rs2.5 billion). More than 8,000 indigenous medicinal plant species can be found here, but just about 1,000 are commonly traded.
But there’s more. The scheme suggests that collecting medicinal plants will earn poor people more money than cultivating food. Will it earn them enough to buy the food they would have grown? There are plans to train people how best to harvest plants sustainably, and the article talks about a genebank, which sounds more like a database to me.
I have my doubts about the wisdom of massively centralised schemes such as this one, especially when, according to the article, the plan is to convert crop-lands to medicinal plants. Does India really have so much food available that it can afford to divert land from edible crops to medicinal plants, no matter how valuable those plants are? One cannot eat money, or medicinal plants.
News from the front: Belize
As far as I know, it has more species of trees, shrubs, bushes, herbs, and grasses than any domestic garden on Earth: 318 species of flowering plants, 250 of which are native to Belize. That’s about 15 percent of the indigenous floristic diversity of the whole country, more species of native plants than live in the forest that surrounds it. Every plant is here for a purpose, used as medicine, food, thatch, fiber, because it attracts butterflies, birds, and mammals, or just because of its beauty.
The garden is Masewal, in western Belize, and the words are from an article in Orion magazine that describes this astonishing place. The vision of one man, who sought to reclaim some of his Mayan heritage and has been doing so for 31 years, using the garden as store-house, teaching aid and demonstration plot. Fascinating.
Belize was my first experience of a tropical forest and I remember the giddiness of it. I wrote something about it back then; I wonder whether I can dig it out.
via Metafilter.