Category: Policy

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Fertilizers: downside seen in China

It really does seem tragic that people need to make their own mistakes, rather than learn from others’. Latest case in point: soils in China are being destroyed by excessive use of fertilizers, which is making the soils too acid to support plant growth. Yields have already dropped 30-50% in some places. The conclusion that profligate and ignorant use of fertilizers comes from a paper published in Science by F.S. Zhang at China Agricultural University in Beijing and colleagues. That is behind a paywall, but there is a report in Nature News.

“They see the green leaves but they don’t see the impact on the soil. If they have a poor crop they think more fertilizer is needed, making matters worse,” Zhang says. Farmers routinely apply double and sometimes triple the necessary amount, he says. Better education could provide a simple solution to the fertilization problem.

People who promote “more fertilizers” as a panacea should consider that they need to deliver more than merely fertilizers.

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Review calls for support of Kew genebank

The independent review of Kew Gardens commissioned by Defra is just out. It has some very nice things to say about the Millennium Seed Bank, and quite rightly so.

The work of the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) is particularly impressive, and the MSB has forged partnerships with more than 120 institutions in 54 countries. Kew has advised many of these partners on how to set up and run seed banks for themselves. This has included, for example, the delivery of germination protocols to a network of 38 national seed banks in sub-Saharan Africa; and the use of seeds from 500 species stored in the MSB for restoration and species recovery programmes worldwide.

Which leads to a recommendation that Defra should pull out its wallet.

The MSB’s operating costs over the past nine years have averaged £4.1 million per annum. They were funded until the end of 2009 by the Millennium Commission. The external funding stream that has been going to the MSB to assist in the running costs ceased from January 2010 and Kew will now either have to fund the MSB from its own resources; seek alternative sources of funding, particularly by building the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership; or downsize or even close the MSB. For the reasons set out in Chapter 2, the review team believes the MSB should be of very high priority for Kew, and it recommends that Kew should be given additional interim funding by Defra, which tapers down over three years, to enable Kew to gather the additional funding support that it needs. We recommend that £3 million be given for this purpose in 2010/11 and £1.5 million in 2011/12.

This is not a particularly good time to make a call on the public finances in Britain, but surely the Millennium Seed Bank is too big — and important — to fail. Defra will no doubt find the money. And so they should.

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Nibbles: EoL, Mixed farming, Conservation medicine, Indicators, Vitamin A, Hamburger, Rewilding, Tejate

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Agriculture vs biodiversity. Still.

Without biodiversity there will be no agriculture.

Well, that got my attention. Because no possibility of breeding new crop varieties, right. Biodiversity as in crop wild relatives, for example. No crop wild relatives, no landraces: no more agriculture. Right? Well, not quite.

Farming practices should not jeopardize species survival: improving farmland diversity and reducing the usage of pesticides and fertiliser are key efforts to saving biodiversity. Organic agriculture practices can serve as an example in many areas.

Which is all true, of course. And IUCN does have its constituency. I understand that. But we really do need to do something about this yawning chasm between the two communities.

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Diversity, diversity everywhere

Food-based strategies are essential to tackle malnutrition and help vulnerable populations cope with environmental change. Genetic modification, crop diversification and soil management can improve access to vital micronutrients.

More research is needed to identify nutritious crop varieties and analyse indigenous and wild species for their nutritional content. In particular, maintaining genetic diversity within home gardens and local agroecosystems can help improve nutrition.

Music to our ears, of course, but the tune goes back to 2002. Odd — and slightly disappointing — that SciDev.Net could find nothing more up to date on this subject for their recent nutrition blitz. Anyway, good to have the agrobiodiversity song played, however old.

Another piece in the SciDev.Net feature looks at the human genetics dimension of the problem. We’ve talked about that here before. You don’t just need to understand how micronutrient content, say, varies among crops and crop varieties, but, as if that wasn’t enough, also how people vary in their ability to make use of these compounds.