Category: Policy

Posted on

A new hope, or the empire strikes back?

I seem to have angered my old friend Nigel Maxted. 1 A recent piece of mine suggested that IUCN’s new book Conservation for a New Era may be evidence of a rapprochement between the biodiversity and agrobiodiversity communities. Nigel begs to differ:

I do not want to dull Luigi’s spin on the Conservation for a New Era which I guess is not meant to be specific but I just think again it draws attention to the need for joined-up conservation, that is the integration of biodiversity with agro-biodiversity conservation which I believe is far too often ignored altogether or simply given lip-service only.

After a detailed analysis of what’s been happening — or not happening — in crop wild relatives conservation, and why, Nigel ends thus:

For me in a time of climate change and increasing food insecurity THE issue is how the better integrate biodiversity with agro-biodiversity conservation, not fashionable perhaps but a real priority. The McNeely and Mainka text in my view fails to address this issue!

Do read the whole thing. What do you think? Glass half full or half empty? Or maybe totally empty? And what do we do about it?

Posted on

Nibbles: Non-wood forest products, Landraces and climate change, Brewing, IRRI, Agroforestry, Borlaug, Mutant

  • New NWFP Digest is out. Bamboo, bamboo and more bamboo. You all have subscribed, right?
  • Your indigenous seeds will set you free. Not if you don’t have a breeding programme and decent seed companies they wont. Or not only.
  • College students to evaluate hop varieties. What could possibly go wrong?
  • “The IRRI is not involved in any projects on land acquisition for rice production, nor do we provide advice on land acquisition.”
  • Agroforestry professor interviewed by Mongabay.
  • Edwin Price vs Vandana Shiva on Borlaug on Oz radio. Let the games begin.
  • Cool chimeric apple.
Posted on

Nibbles: Sunflower breeding, ITPGRFA, Grape genetics, ABA

Posted on

Indications of failure

ResearchBlogging.orgA group of over 20 biodiversity experts from a slew of international conservation agencies have a paper out in Science bemoaning the state of the biodiversity indicators agreed in 2006. 2 These indicators are important because they are supposed to be used to track progress towards fulfillment of the promise made by Parties under the Convention on Biological Diversity to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. They have also been incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals.

The authors point to problems with the “availability, consistency, and relevance” of data on even the indicators that are reasonably well-developed at the global scale. Some indicators — 5 of the 22 — “are not being developed at a global scale” at all, such as the one on access and benefit sharing. 3 The next Conference of the Parties of the CBD (which meets in Japan in October 2010) “will review progress and agree on a new set of targets and a revised indicator framework.”

I hope one of the things it will consider in the new set of targets is crop genetic erosion. There are currently two indicators under the “Trends in genetic erosion” rubric, covering ex situ crop collections and livestock diversity respectively. Here’s what the indicators website has to say about the ex situ collections indicator:

Currently, studies are being undertaken to measure the dynamics of genetic diversity of collections from selected genebanks (EURISCO, USDA, SINGER, ICRISAT and CIAT), in order to develop a model to be applied more systematically worldwide. Based on data from these sources, the evolution over time in quantitative and qualitative terms (number of species; number of accessions/species; geographic origin and distribution of newly added accession versus existing ones) of collected samples was investigated.

I’m ashamed to say I know no more about it than that, but will try to find out the latest. Or maybe someone out there can bring us up to date. Anyway, there is no indicator that I can see on trend of genetic diversity in farmers’ fields, although there is one on sustainable management of agroecosystems.

We all know this is a fraught subject, not least politically, and we should perhaps be grateful that there is anything at all on agrobiodiversity among the indicators 4, but we cannot go on quoting at best anecdotal, at worst dubious, figures on loss of crop diversity and expect to be taken seriously. To say, as the authors of the Science paper do, that

…indicators of genetic biodiversity are slowly being compiled for domesticated and cultivated varieties but not yet for wild relatives.

is frankly not hugely reassuring.