Policy

March 22, 2012March 23, 2012

Make mine an MLS decaff

There was a nice article recently in Nature reviewing the struggle — and it’s been a mighty struggle, which is still going on — to breed a naturally low-caffeine coffee plant. It’s worth reading in full, if you can get hold of it, but I just want to focus briefly here on this paragraph:

In 2000, Mazzafera teamed up with Silvarolla, a coffee breeder at the IAC. They shifted their focus to a group of C. arabica plants originally collected during a 1964 United Nations expedition to Eritrea and Ethiopia. Seed samples — 620 in total — were divided up and grown in several countries, including Costa Rica. Later, 308 of these lineages were collected in Costa Rica and sent to Brazil. Mazzafera believed it would be much easier to produce marketable coffee by starting with the Ethiopian C. arabica plants than by hybridizing with other species.

What’s interesting about this is that the ORSTOM (now France’s IRD), FAO and IBPGR collections made in the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1964 one alluded to above, still form the bulk of the material maintained in coffee genebanks around the world. Sure, there’s been more collecting in Ethiopia since then, but that material is much more difficult for breeders outside that country to get hold of than the results of these older international collecting initiatives.

That’s at least partly because Coffea is not among the crops which are supposed to be liable to facilitated access under the multilateral system of access and benefit sharing (MLS) being put in place by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

Ah, but wait. That reference to Costa Rica in the paragraph above really means CATIE, or the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Turrialba. And that institute has put all its collections under Article 15 of the Treaty. Yes, including coffee.

If the world is to have its naturally decaffeinated cappuccinos, a good first step might be to put in place a multilateral system for coffee too, which goes beyond the CATIE collection. That would surely help get breeders using as wide a range of diversity as possible. Or at least as is available in existing collections. That these are far from complete, especially as regards wild relatives, is well understood. But that’s something for another post.

March 21, 2012March 21, 2012

Nibbles: Small farmers, Wild bananas, Titan arum, Fish for diversity, Tenure, Treaty, Australian genebank, Mexican genebank, Mexican drought, Potato record, Khat and fodder in Ethiopia

On my signal, unleash the potential of small farmers and food producers worldwide. Has a return ring to it.
More than anyone could reasonably want to know about wild banana relatives in Thailand.
Big stinky flower with its own webcam. Must be a wild relative of something.
Better in many ways to catch a diversity of fish species than to focus on one.
Could probably do with some guidelines for access to fisheries, though, right?
International Seed Treaty secretariat knocks ‘em dead down under. “THREE-quarters of the world’s crop biodiversity has been irrevocably lost since 1900.”
Of course it has. Did Dr Bhatti visit this place during his tour of Oz, I wonder? If not, maybe he’ll visit Mexico next and see this place. And speaking of Mexico…
Mexico sneezes, US grain exports catch a cold?
World record potato harvest in Bihar; there’s a lot that’s fishy about this story.
“Khat cultivation in Ethiopia fuels economy, reduces deforestation.” And makes people sick, but who’s counting.
Ah but here’s a possible alternative. Now, if only CIFOR and ILRI would talk together about this.

March 20, 2012March 20, 2012

Nibbles: Ancient sauce, Easter eggs, REDD and biodiversity

Ancient fish sauce recreated.
Easter egg symbolism deconstructed.
Monitoring biodiversity in REDD projects. Including CWR?

March 19, 2012March 20, 2012

Nibbles: Treaty in Malaysia, Vavilov in Sardinia, Vegetative crops, Aquaculture, Indian AnGR, Seed Savers, Ancient Egypt and thereabouts, Quinoa in Chile

Michael Halewood in Genebank Policy Hell.
Vavilov in Genebank Database Hell.
A guide through Clonal Crops Conservation Hell.
Pakistan contemplates genebank for carp “pure line and improved stairs for SAARC countries.” Bicycles next, I suppose. But will Ghana follow suit?
Meanwhile across the border, India is putting resources into livestock conservation at both national and state level.
Italian broccoli variety moves to Florida and makes the big time.
And ancient Egyptian gardens make the big time in Amsterdam. Too bad it wont be possible to exchange seeds.
I bet those ancient Egyptians had taro. They certainly had wheat and barley.
But not quinoa, alas, despite what Thor Heyerdahl might have thought.

March 17, 2012March 17, 2012

A diversity of nibbles

Got held up with sickness and overwork, so rather than nibbling, which takes work, ¹ how about a kinda narrative thang?

Starting off with a piece from Agriculture for Impact asking does planting trees compete with planting food?. “It depends,” natch. Richer farmers tend to do well in the particular scheme, which was based on payments for carbon sequestration. The one comment on the post – Planting trees is more profitable than planting food crops – puts in a nutshell the difficulties of improving local food security. Can you buy as much nutrition as you could grow on the same land? Is sequestering carbon considered in the USDA’s new Economic Research Report Rural Wealth Creation: Concepts, Strategies, and Measures? I’ve no idea. Also, on prices and wealth, Marcelino Fuentes calls the do-gooders for their volte-face on high food prices. Surely they’re good for poor farmers? Not any more. and how I remember the squirming when this very topic came up at the FAO in 2008.

In the wake of The Economist’s encomium to Svalbard, the Western Farm Press links that fine safety backup seed bank to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, calling it “the oldest global seed bank”. Pavlovsk is still under threat, which Svalbard presumably is not, so point taken. But c’mon, people, it is not a seed bank.

And speaking of seeds, Garden Organic in the UK has a new guide to exotica, serving the needs of communities new to the English Midlands who want to grow the stuff they’ve always eaten. I’d have thought they already knew how, but maybe the real point is to harvest that knowledge.

All those communities moving around the place have been known to muddy the linguistic waters around the things they eat; your rocket is my arugula, and neither of us knows what rughetta might be. There’s long been an on-again off-again project at Melbourne University, to compile a multilingual, multi script plant name database, which is useful if you have specific questions. Now comes something that might be altogether more provocative of interesting work: on open data standard for food. I’m not geeky enough to know exactly how it will be useful – for example in citizen science, or global surveys – but I am geeky enough to believe that it will indeed be useful.