- Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities. Quite a mouthful…
- Podcast: A Snapshot of Chinese Agriculture with Mike Mulvaney. Mouthwatering.
- “…how can agricultural landscapes produce more with less impact?” The BBC tells us.
- Florida’s citrus in trouble. Genomics to the rescue?
A pioneering biologist almost discusses the keys to crop conservation
Because right now, still, the planet is blind. In other words I can step into the genebank of Brazil and understand it. But 99.9999 percent of the planet cannot. And so whether you’re eating in a restaurant in New York City, whether you’re a Nigerian farmer, or whether you’re a school kid walking to school in Arizona — it doesn’t matter. You are blind; you are illiterate. And this gives you the chance to be able to read. That will change our relationship to agrobiodiversity enormously. And I feel that’s the only chance for [combating] apathy. If people can “read” agrobiodiversity, they will then, for their own reasons, find it much more valuable to be interested in it, and as a consequence, [are] much more likely to be willing to save key pieces of it… And the only way that societies will be tolerant of big genebanks is if those big genebanks are offering them something. And if you’re blind to what’s in it, you’ve suddenly cut the list of what it can offer you down very severely…
The world has 1700 different crop genebanks. Every one of those things is someone’s salary, someone’s career, someone’s motivation. And they couldn’t care less about the whole thing. They care about the pieces in their backyard. And so the outcome is that you have 1700 collections which add up to x percent of the whole genepools. Well, if you ask me, I will tell you brutally that 50 percent of those will be dead and worthless in 50 years. But that doesn’t help the guy whose job it is to protect it, to raise money for it. He wants his income now. And the fact that it’s going to die 50 years from now couldn’t matter less…
I had to give a five-minute talk in California a few months ago, and I found myself saying, “Look, the threats are fragmentation, apathy, climate change, and small size.” Those are the threats. And the solutions are endowment, bigger size, and information systems…
Well, the legendary conservationist Daniel Janzen didn’t say these things. Not quite, anyway. But I didn’t change many words, and not by much. He was talking about protected areas, but it is quite amazing how similar are the problems of ex situ conservation of crop diversity. Too bad the two things are so often seen as antithetical.
The microbe commons in the spotlight
The International Journal of the Commons, a new one on me, has a special issue on microbes. Actually, not just microbes. The idea seems to be to compare and contrast what is happening in microbial genetic resources with the access and benefit sharing and IPR regimes which are in force for other bits of biodiversity. There’s even an interesting paper entitled “Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration,” by Byerlee and Dubin. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, is a member of the editorial board of the journal.
Nibbles: Seeds, Organics, Absinthe, Potato, Cattle genome, Tree diseases, Rice, ABS, Avian flu
- Software will ease seed availability. No, really.
- Enforcement of organic regulations sometimes flawed. No really.
- Absinthism a myth. No, really.
- Potato film hits big time. No, really.
- “Influential” bulls sequenced. No, really.
- Tree diseases distribution will change under climate change. No, really?
- Boffins in drive to double rice production in Africa. No, really.
- Boffins and lawyers meet to sort out biodiversity access and benefit sharing thing. No, really. And, incidentally, what could possibly go wrong?
- H5N1 committee wonders whether they have sampled enough. No, really.
Rebuilding livelihoods in Haiti through fairs
It’s very easy to assume that after a disaster one of the things that farmers would most welcome from the outside is good seed. But of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, as an assessment by Catholic Relief Services of the seed sector in Haiti after the recent earthquake makes clear. Perhaps the key result was that there was plenty of seed around:
Good quality seed of the varieties that farmers’ prefer is available in the areas surveyed. The household survey shows that farmers are utilizing similar levels of own seed stock as in previous years. Vendors in the market report normal levels of seed for sale.
The problem was access:
Families simply do not have resources available to make the usual investments in agriculture. This has led, in some instances, to decisions to actually cultivate less because of inability to acquire inputs (including seed, fertilizer, and animal traction).
There were also changes in cropping patterns, with a shift towards shorter-duration crops to get quick yields and income. The main recommendation was stark:
Direct seed distribution should not take place… This emergency is not the appropriate time to try to introduce improved varieties on anything more than a small scale for farmer evaluation.
And there was some trenchant criticism of previous seed distribution programmes:
…seed provided by FAO post hurricane last year either arrived too late to plant during the season or failed to germinate.
Rather, CRS recommended that there should be seed fairs to facilitate access to locally available and adapted planting material, food distribution to alleviate pressure on seed reserves and cash for work to build up household capital to purchase inputs. And also something I’d never heard of: livelihoods fairs, with vouchers. There’s not much on the internet about these, but they seem to take the idea of seed fairs and extend them to other necessities of rural life, such as tools, fertilizers and tin roofing. The idea is “to help restore liquidated reserves and enable farm households to start reinvesting in their productive capacity.”
Now that all seems very sensible, and it strikes me that it probably isn’t the fist time a survey along these lines has been done, and such recommendations put forward. But are the mistakes of the past being repeated anyway?