- Yet another USDA genebank in the news. This time it’s maize.
- G20 Agriculture vice-ministers recommend to “Support the development and promotion of a global information sharing system on plant and animal genetic resources.”
- Bison returns to Germany.
- Learn population genomics of crops and livestock.
- Ebony is a pretty old word.
- How Salvia got around.
Taking Vital Sign’s temperature
It completely escaped our notice that a project called Vital Signs was launched a few months ago in Africa with a $10 million, 3-year grant from the Gates Foundation. The grantees are Conservation International, The Earth Institute and South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the idea is as follows:
The Vital Signs Africa monitoring system provides near-real time data and diagnostic tools to inform agricultural development decisions and monitor their outcomes. Vital Signs metrics and indicators will verify that investments to improve food production also support healthy natural systems and robust livelihoods for smallholder farmers.
Very worthy, and right up our alley here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, which makes it all the more galling that we didn’t pick up on it earlier. Anyway, some preliminary results for one area in Tanzania (the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania, or SAGCOT) were presented at the recent AGRA Forum in Arusha, which is how we got to hear about it now.
The question, of course, is whether agricultural biodiversity is being monitored, along with such things as population density, household income, value of biodiversity and fuelwood availability, which are among the data categories that were discussed in Arusha. That “value of biodiversity” does sound promising, but then you read only that “through park entry fees, photography permits and other sources of income, this value is estimated to be more than US$ 650 million per year in the SAGCOT.”
The project’s website is not much help, as it has little beyond some admittedly very nice photographs. But I guess it’s early days yet. I have contacted the people concerned and hopefully I’ll be able to report back very soon.
It is interesting that the Gates Foundation is using Vital Signs as an example of its interest in, and commitment to, agroecological approaches to agricultural development, though whether the project qualifies is disputed.
Nibbles: GBIF, Maize Day, European biodiversity indicators, Fishy podcast, CABI website, Seed chipper, Indian biodiversity
- GBIF Science Symposium presentations online.
- Yes, I missed Mexico’s National Day of Maize too.
- Europe has some biodiversity indicators. And wants them streamlined. Some agriculture in there, if you look hard enough.
- WorldFish DG reflects.
- CABI wants help with its new website.
- Every breeder should have a seed chipper.
- India pushes seaweeds and spices. How about evergreen agriculture, though? I feel a COP coming on…
Nibbles: Innovative crops, twice, Seed saving, Jatropha, Cimmyt, Common ownership
- Of course garlic and dill are innovative crops – if you live in the Pamirs.
- So is Stevia, in Spain.
- A big new book on saving your own seeds. Ignore the rhetoric, and don’t try this in Europe, folks.
- Crops for the Future calls Jatropha a “debacle”. Hard to argue with that.
- All about CIMMYT at an agro-biodiversity fair.
- Put a price tag on natural resources, and you risk undermining common ownership.
Safeguarding safflower
In the late 1950’s and mid 1960’s, Knowles traveled over 32,000 miles with his wife and son overland across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia gathering germplasm of wild and domesticated safflower species, an effort which produced most of the species now in the USDA world safflower collection.
Paulden F. Knowles worked at UC Davis for 35 years, retiring in 1982. Just before he died in 1990, he wrote out in longhand the story of his career in safflower development. That document has now been edited Patrick E. McGuire, Ardeshir B. Damania, and Calvin O. Qualset of the Department of Plant Sciences, and is available online. It makes for fascinating reading. But I can’t resist the temptation of leaving you with an excerpt from the editors’ summary, rather than the report itself.
Paul Knowles’ work finished with the decade of the 1980s. At the time of his death in 1990, work was underway that would culminate with the opening for signature in 1992 of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its subsequent entry into force at the end of 1993. It is an important question whether he could have done his work in the international germplasm access and exchange environment that exists post-CBD. Certainly under the CBD, there is nothing in theory that would prevent his accomplishments, but in practice the many bilateral agreements for exchange of germplasm necessary today and the difficulty in obtaining these (as exemplified by the records of the past 20 years) make it highly unlikely that the current state of safflower knowledge and productivity would have been possible. The International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and its Multilateral System for genetic resources access that emerged in the early 2000s would not have helped Knowles’ safflower work either. Safflower is not one of the crops covered under the Treaty.