Policy

January 8, 2010June 23, 2017

Indigenous vs exotic trees in Kenya

I promised to reveal a silver lining to the black cloud of my mother-in-law’s forced felling of part of the eucalypt plantation she’s been tending and coppicing forever, her main source of firewood, so here goes. The sight of the newly bare patch of land made her start looking around for a source of seedlings for replanting, and a coincidental visit by some old friends of mine got her thinking that maybe she should go indigenous. At least partly, anyway. Eucalypts are too fast-growing to give up altogether. Her visitors were Lex Thomson and Randy Thaman, who I worked with in the Pacific, and were in Kenya for the International Agroforestry Congress. They noticed a few Prunus africana trees around her place, and told her about its potential. Lex has since left a comment about this on an earlier blog post of mine.

Anyway, after some searching around, Hilda (for that is her name) came across Mr Douglas Ndirangu Kirichu’s nursery at a place called Lari Forest Station in Uplands Division, a short drive along a passable dirt road from her farm. Mr Kirichu runs the Kimotu Environmental Group. He has about a hundred people who collect seeds from the surrounding forest, which he then raises to seedlings and sells, for KSh 30 each (that’s about USD 0.50). Apparently there’s a law that a community can only graze their animals in the forest if they also have a nursery raising indigenous tree seedlings for replanting. So that’s what Mr Kirichu’s group does. To the tune of about 30,000 seedlings when we visited him. ((Oh, and thanks to Hilda’s daughter Linda for taking the notes during our visit.))

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In addition to Prunus africana (mueri in Kikuyu), Mr Kirichu (that’s him on the left in the picture below) also has muna (Aningeria), mutamayo (Olea), mukoe (Dombeya), pondo and mukima (not sure what these are — maybe someone out there can help me?).

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So we bought a couple of each, of course. And Hilda got a dozen mueri to start off her plantation.

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And we planted them both up at the farm (thanks, GK!) and down in Nairobi. Maybe that made the holiday carbon neutral?

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January 7, 2010January 8, 2010

Re-inventing the genebank. Not.

Jeffrey Walck and Kingsley Dixon ((Who are respectively at the Department of Biology, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee and at the School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia, West Perth.)) have a piece on genebanks in December’s Nature entitled “Time to future-proof plants in storage.” ((Walck, J., & Dixon, K. (2009). Time to future-proof plants in storage Nature, 462 (7274), 721-721 DOI: 10.1038/462721a)) It says some important things, but in a way that suggests that nobody has thought of them before, or has done anything about it, which I think needs to be countered. ((I wont say anything here about the lumping together of the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is just plain silly.)) The article is behind a paywall, alas.

Here’s the crux of Walck and Dixon’s beef.

At low temperatures, seeds can remain viable for hundreds if not thousands of years. Herein lies the problem: such seeds are literally frozen in time, a snapshot of the genetic diversity of a species at a particular point. Attempts to revive a seed in future habitats very different from those in which it developed could be doomed to failure. A germinating seed is genetically programmed to respond to a precise interplay of temperature and moisture that determines the climatic conditions in which it can best develop. In an environment that lacks the right temperature and moisture balance — which is likely to be disrupted by climate change — a seed will either fail to germinate or the seedling will perish soon afterwards (see Fig. 1).

What are their suggestions for getting around this problem? Here’s a summary:

1. Harvest as much genetic diversity as possible, including at the edge of species ranges, and at different points in time. And harvest large quantities of seed whenever possible.

2. Screen the plants for their adaptation to different environments. “For instance, subjecting seedlings to increased temperatures could allow the selection of those with higher heat tolerance.”

alter the home range of a species

4. “Policy-makers must get involved too: a comprehensive international agreement is required to coordinate the collection of genetic material, particularly for cross-border wild species.”

So, that would be collect properly, evaluate, match seeds to environments and put in place an international policy infrastructure. Doh! I really can’t see anything in that list that genebanks are not already trying to do. Can you? Maybe they’re not doing it as well as they might, and certainly the policy environment is still not ideal, but there’s surely nothing particularly new about these recommendations. Sure, it is always useful to remind a community about best practices, but it would have been nice to point out that genebank managers around the world know what these are, and are in fact trying to follow them.

If they had wanted to suggest something that isn’t already in place, why didn’t they mention the pressing need for a comprehensive global information system? Now that would be an improvement. And yes, we — and they — are working on it.

January 7, 2010

Millions Fed

That’s the title of an IFPRI project funded by the Gates Foundation which aims to document success stories in agricultural development. We mentioned it here before, when it was just being launched. There are a couple of agrobiodiversity examples among the case studies, including maize in Africa, mungbean in Asia and diet diversification in Bangladesh.

January 7, 2010January 7, 2010

Nibbles: Goldman Environmental Prize, UK networking, European landraces publication, Seed Warriors, India agrobiodiversity sites, Beer books, Teosinte, Drought foods, Sugarcane genebank, Regional genebank in South Asia, Rhubarb, Annals, Food articles, Cryo

Goldman Prizewinner Jesús León Santos: “It is time we recognize that traditional agricultural methods can make strong contributions to biodiversity conservation. We should encourage it and value it as a way to produce healthy foods that conserve and care for the environment.” Time indeed.
British twofer: The Food Climate Research Network aims “to better understand how the food system contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and to research and promote ways of reducing them.” Then there’s the Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures. Will they talk to each other, I wonder.
From Bioversity, “European landraces: on-farm conservation, management and use.” I wonder if the Foresight Project will download a copy.
The “Seed Warriors” trailer. Oscar buzz, I hear.
Agricultural biodiversity heritage sites in India. Ethnobotanist brings together information on food plants used during drought. Mashup, anyone?
A book about beer. My two favourite things. Oooh, here’s another couple! And it’s not over: Spiegel weighs in on the old chestnut about beer being the reason for agriculture. My tankard runneth over.
CIMMYT team monitors teosinte. Teosinte planning to fight back.
Regional sugarcane genebank is actually being used! Heartwarming. Oh, and, coincidentally, here’s a history of Indian sugarcane breeding.
“A SAARC Plant Genetic Resource Bank for rice, wheat and maize may be created to facilitate free exchange of germplasm between the member countries. To begin with, the Indian Gene Bank facilities may be utilized, with suitable modalities.” Not so heartwarming.
The Russian roots of Alaskan rhubarb. Take that, Palin! Note the bit about St Isaac’s Cathedral, which of course sits opposite VIR. How apposite is that?
Nigel Chaffey rounds up the usual suspects in presenting a potpourri of “plant-based items from the world’s media” for Annals of Botany. May well be one to watch. And not just because genebanks make an appearance.
Amazing food roundup.
Cryopreserving Chip, the Tennessee fainting goat.

January 7, 2010January 8, 2010

Cutting down (some of) Kenya’s eucalypts

You may remember I threw a bit of a hissy fit some time back when my mother-in-law was forced to cut down some of her eucalypt plantation as part of a Kenyan government effort to combat the drought that was plaguing the country (it has since broken in a big way, causing much flooding in places). Well, I was there at Christmas and saw the result for myself, and what really got me was not so much what she was forced to do, but the fact that the order is not being not uniformly applied. Have a look.

gums

Now, a year ago I would not have been able to take that picture because of the thick stand of blue gums I would have been standing in. Gone now, of course, though some are beginning to re-sprout. But the question is: why weren’t the big-shot owners of the huge tea farm on the other side of the valley forced to cut down their eucalypts? They’re even closer to the stream than ours were.

Anyway, some good did come out of all this. More on that later.