- The politics of rice in Cambodia.
- Who needs Moiled Cattle when you have snails. With video goodness.
- Providing a baseline for future tropical forages collecting in Vietnam?
- WWF plugs sustainable rattan in the Mekong.
The pedigree of tolerance to submergence in rice
You may remember a post a few days ago about submergence-tolerant rice. Our friends at IRRI have been kind enough to explain to me where the gene in question — sub1 — came from.
I hope I get this right. It seems the immediate parent for IR64-sub1 was from the cross IR49830, which in turn came from the cross IR22385, made in 1978. The source of the gene at the time was a line called FR13A, which was derived from a germplasm accession called IRGC 8887. That was acquired by IRRI in 1963 from India, but with no further passport data.
If you want to get an impression of the complexity of the pedigrees of modern varieties, below is the one for IR64-sub1, with IRGC 8887 highlighted in yellow, thanks to the pedigree visualization tool that IRRI has been developing (click to enlarge).
It’s a great illustration of the reason for the Multilateral System of access and benefit sharing being put in place by the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In a bilateral system, such as the one envisaged by the Convention on Biological Diversity, how would you work out the contribution of IRGC 8887 — or indeed any of the other germplasm involved in the pedigree — to the overall success or otherwise of the final product?
Farm business doing OK
Department of Silver Linings: No matter how bad things get, people still need to eat. The Economist reports on good times in the agriculture industry, even though “much of the global economy is falling apart and demand both for consumer goods ((Food, of course, is the canonical consumer good. Or is it?)) and the firms that make and finance them is collapsing”. You want scary?
China is consuming twice as much vegetable oil (instead of less healthy pork fat), 60% more poultry, 30% more beef and 25% more wheat, and these are merely the obvious foods. Scores of niches have expanded dramatically: people are drinking four times as much wine, for example.
And yet even with all this growth, people in China still, on average, consume only one-third as much milk and meat as people in wealthy countries such as Australia, America and Britain. The gap is even larger with India, which is also growing fast.
Buy now, while stocks last.
Nibbles: Farmers, Fertilizer, Bangladesh
- Real farmers …
- AGRA et al. seeks ways to make more affordable fertilizer available to Africa.
- Strengthening Community Gardening in Bangladesh, with lots of added ITPGRFA goodness.
Nibbles: Fruits, Natives, Economics, Artichoke, Gardens
- Beautiful Images of Strange Fruits. Botanical not culinary, mostly
- Hawaiians paid to plant natives.
- Dismal science tells boffins which cattle breeds to save. Yeah, because we all so trust economists these days, right?
- “Cynara 2009, the 7th International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon And Their Wild Relatives, will be held in Saint Pol de Léon, Brittany, France, the ‘home town’ of the famous artichoke variety Camus de Bretagne.” Via.
- Pinoy allotment manual.