- Need a new pest or disease? Here’s the latest list from CAB Abstracts.
- WHO’s e-Library of Evidence for Nutrition Actions. No food, as such, that I could see.
- Is “famine” partly the result of a fixation on maize?
- Nah, course not. At least, I think not … “Drought persuades Kenya to import GM maize“.
- CIAT and partners toast new BREAD project. (FX: Groan.) It’s about breeding cassava and banana.
- Plant Breeders Without Borders. Read more here. Could do with a snappier title, I reckon.
- India’s long-range weather forecast looks bad.
- Modern vegetables are less nutritious.
Nibbles: Nutrition, Famine, Incentives, Pests & Diseases, Employment, Genebank support, Commercialisation, Hay & Straw, Nitrogen fixing
- Jess dissects nutrition mystification. So hey, Jess, what field do you work in?
- Can agricultural research help eradicate famine? CGIAR boss asks the tough ones.
- Giant FAO document on Payments for Ecosystem Services and Food Security.
- Crop diversity and disease pressure, The case of maize in China.
- Wanna job? Crops for the Future Research Centre is hiring.
- Our chums at the Global Crop Diversity Trust get a Dutch treat.
- Nagoya Protocol threatens to conserve Mexican biodiversity.
- The Scientist Gardener distinguishes hay from straw.
- Ford Denison scrutinizes nitrogen-fixing cereals paper.
Brainfood: Barley genes, Stability & Diversity, Access & Benefit Sharing,
- Analysis of >1000 single nucleotide polymorphisms in geographically matched samples of landrace and wild barley indicates secondary contact and chromosome-level differences in diversity around domestication genes. They’ve been exchanging genes! Oh, and the site of domestication may be further south.
- Identifying population- and community-level mechanisms of diversity–stability relationships in experimental grasslands. Stability depends on a few dominant species that are out of sync with one another.
- Effective governance of access and benefit-sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Identifies six critical factors that determine the effectiveness of ABS governance.
- Diversity and abundance of arthropods in subtropical rice growing areas in the Brazilian south. They’re abundant! And diverse!
Nibbles: Deep roots, Price volatility, Togo, Why should I care?
- Deeper roots could store CO2 and resist drought? Well, yeah, I suppose. Need to find the original paper.
- Commodity price volatility 101; off topic, but important.
- Good return on investment for agricultural aid in Togo. Some vegetables included.
- Stuart Pimm answers “why should I care” questions about biodiversity. No time to listen, so no idea whether he does any agrobiodiversity.
Famine and diversity
The famine unfolding in Africa is rightly dominating news and comment around the world, the more since it is now “official”. One recurrent theme is that the disaster could have been, and was, foretold … and ignored. Jeffrey Sachs says he warned the US President.
[T]wo years ago, in a meeting with US President Barack Obama, I described the vulnerability of the African drylands. When the rains fail there, wars begin. I showed Obama a map from my book Common Wealth, which depicts the overlap of dryland climates and conflict zones. I noted to him that the region urgently requires a development strategy, not a military approach.
Obama responded that the US Congress would not support a major development effort for the drylands. “Find me another 100 votes in Congress,” he said.
I shouldn’t think the votes are there now, either, but Sachs’ fourfold prescription remains at least partially valid. Whether this particular drought can be laid at the door of climate change is not relevant; climate change will make droughts (and floods) more severe an we need to deal realistically with the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change. Fertility rates are high, but if history is anything to go by, they won’t come down until living conditions and prospects improve. The region is poor and so, as Sachs notes, shocks that other regions might shrug off push it towards calamity. And unstable politics exacerbate the other problems; food security is hard to achieve in a region without other forms of security.
The big question is what sort of development strategy would work best in the region. Sachs, naturally enough, favours something like the interventions going on in the Millennium Villages Project. None of those, however, seem to me to address the root problem, which is that the land is too dry and too unpredictable to support anything other than pastoralism, and that pastoralism is a victim as much of modern geopolitics as it is of climate change. I have no idea what to think when I read things like this:
The government [of Kenya] has announced plans to immediately put 10,000 hectares of land in the River Omo delta around Lake Turkana under irrigation to produce maize, sorghum, vegetables and fruits to ease the food crisis frequently experienced in the region.
Can that possibly be the right approach? It seems very unlikely. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on the information being shared at ILRI’s newsy blog.