Policy – Page 39 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 1, 2022

Preserving vegetables

Regular readers will know that while we’re big fans here of African traditional vegetables, we are also skeptical about the usefulness of formal “protection” for foods. So I for one am a tiny bit conflicted about some recent news from Kenya:

The Intergovernmental Committee for Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, upon the proposal, has selected Kenya’s success story of promoting traditional foods and safeguarding traditional foodways in Kenya as a programme, project, or activity best reflecting the principles and objectives of the Convention.

But only a tiny bit. Congratulations to everyone involved.

January 31, 2022January 31, 2022

Brainfood: Genebanks, Covid, Sustainable intensification, Anthropocene, Biodiversity value, Cropland expansion, Better diet, Biodiversity indicators, Climate change impact, Soil fertility, Agroecology & GMOs

Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Resilience, but at a cost.
Avenues for improving farming sustainability assessment with upgraded tools, sustainability framing and indicators. A review. How to measure an important aspect of the above-mentioned resilience.
Envisaging an Effective Global Long-Term Agrobiodiversity Conservation System That Promotes and Facilitates Use. To effectively guarantee the resilience of farmers and the food system, genebank accessions for likely future use need to be distinguished dynamically from those for immediate use on the basis of the best available data, and then managed differently.
Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene. Naturalization of phylogenetically diverse exotic plants from Australia, the Pacific and Europe is leading to a more homogeneous world flora. Much the same could be said of diets, come to think of it, except maybe for the geographic source of the plants, which is interesting in itself.
Identifying science-policy consensus regions of high biodiversity value and institutional recognition. And less than a third of the bits of the Earth that everyone thinks are important in terms of biodiversity are protected, including from the above exotics.
Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. There was a 9% increase in cropland area in 2003-2019, mainly in Africa and South America, half of it replacing natural vegetation.
Include biodiversity representation indicators in area-based conservation targets. Needed because of the above exotic invasives and cropland expansion, among other things.
Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Those new cropland areas will soon be in trouble. Unless genebanks and plant breeding, I guess.
Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty. Could that cropland grow gene-edited crops in an agroecological setting? Yes, but that will require recognizing that agroecology is not a setting.
Plant biodiversity and the regeneration of soil fertility. Restoring biodiversity restores soil fertility too.
Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health and the environment. Replace just 10% of meat calories with fruit and veggies for the win-win. Is this the answer to all of the above? Well, maybe, maybe not.

January 28, 2022

Nibbles: Aurochs, Horse domestication, Tanzanian seeds, Legume portal, MGIS, ISF, Mexico & Philippines

A wild relative making a comeback in Europe.
Can wild horses be far behind?
An effort to bring back traditional foods in Tanzania.
A new data portal on legumes.
An old data portal gets an update.
ISF resources on plant genetic resources.
Mexican coconut and beverage resources are really Filipino resources.

January 24, 2022February 8, 2022

Brainfood: Transformation, Diet diversity, Millets, European wheat, European phenotyping, Maize NDVI, Brazil soybean, Wild wheat quality, Macadamia genome, Domestication, Cacao genebanks, Camelina, W African cooking

An analysis of the transformative potential of major food system report recommendations. Most recommendations are nudges rather than transformative. But is that such a bad thing?
Linking farm production diversity to household dietary diversity controlling market access and agricultural technology usage: evidence from Noakhali district, Bangladesh. Farm diversity is associated with dietary diversity, but less if markets and irrigation are to hand. Phew, that’s good.
Leveraging millets for developing climate resilient agriculture. Never mind the yield, feel the stability. Plus they’re good for you.
Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Not great that breeding has narrowed the genepool. Will it happen to millets next?
A European perspective on opportunities and demands for field-based crop phenotyping. Would be good to have more sites in Central Europe, no?
Genetic dissection of seasonal vegetation index dynamics in maize through aerial based high-throughput phenotyping. 1752 accessions fall into 2 phenological groups. Do it in Europe next?
Changes in soybean cultivars released over the past 50 years in southern Brazil. Yield has gone up, but protein concentration down. No word on stability. Nor overall diversity. Good and bad.
The grain quality of wheat wild relatives in the evolutionary context. Breeders should focus on the timopheevii lineage if they want to do some good.
Signatures of selection in recently domesticated macadamia. Further evidence for the one-step domestication of clonal crops.
Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process. One-step is precisely how domestication did NOT happen for seed crops in the Neolithic though.
Conservation and use of genetic resources of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) by gene banks and nurseries in six Latin American countries. Not a great situation for such a financially important crop. Makes you think.
Chloroplast phylogenomics in Camelina (Brassicaceae) reveals multiple origins of polyploid species and the maternal lineage of C. sativa. Such a lot of work, and they still don’t know in which landscape domestication took place.
Making the invisible visible: tracing the origins of plants in West African cuisine through archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis. 3500 years of continuity in West African cooking investigated via lipid profiles on pottery. And fast forward…

January 17, 2022January 17, 2022

Brainfood: CGIAR, Wheat adoption, Durum erosion, Napier grass diversity, Asian trees, Cannabis origins, Potato genome, Somaclonal variation, Sugarcane collections, On farm beans, Crowd-sourced diets, Banana mapping, Medicinal enset, Vitis diversity

Viewpoint: Aligning vision and reality in publicly funded agricultural research for development: A case study of CGIAR. Some countries and crops are being short-changed.
Institutional and farm-level challenges limiting the diffusion of new varieties from public and CGIAR centers: The case of wheat in Morocco. No way either Morocco nor wheat are being short-changed, and yet both micro-level and institutional factors are holding back new varieties there.
Estimation of genetic erosion on Ethiopian tetraploid wheat landraces using different approaches. No such adoption problems in Ethiopia, it seems.
Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits in Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and QTL Regions Governing Forage Biomass Yield, Water Use Efficiency and Feed Quality Traits. Napier grass is clearly not being short-changed. I’m sure my MIL would approve.
Tropical and subtropical Asia’s valued tree species under threat. Not valued enough, though.
The origin of the genus Cannabis. If CGIAR decides to work on cannabis, Yunnan would be the place to start getting material from.
Phased, chromosome-scale genome assemblies of tetraploid potato reveals a complex genome, transcriptome, and predicted proteome landscape underpinning genetic diversity. Clonal propagation and limited meiosis has really short-changed the potato, but this work, which includes CGIAR, will really help breeders get rid of accumulated nasty alleles.
Somaclonal variation in clonal crops: containing the bad, exploring the good. And then there’s somaclonal variation…
Sugarcane Genetic Diversity and Major Germplasm Collections. Ripe for the above treatment. Followed by take-over by CGIAR.
On-farm conservation in Phaseolus lunatus L: an alternative for agricultural biodiversity. On farm conservation must not be short-changed.
Leveraging Digital Tools and Crowdsourcing Approaches to Generate High-Frequency Data for Diet Quality Monitoring at Population Scale in Rwanda. Younger people get short-changed in their diet; but, surprisingly, women do not.
UAV-Based Mapping of Banana Land Area for Village-Level Decision-Support in Rwanda. Can’t help thinking we’re being short-changed by not mashing this up with the above somehow.
The Genetic Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum) Landraces Used in Traditional Medicine Is Similar to the Diversity Found in Non-medicinal Landraces. The title short-changes the casual reader. Medicinal varieties are in fact different from non-medicinal varieties, but do not cluster together. Mapping from space next?
Phenological diversity in wild and hybrid grapes (Vitis) from the USDA-ARS cold-hardy grape collection. No sign of short-changing grapevine, at least in the US, resulting in some interesting opportunities for its expansion into new areas using wild relatives.

1. Three Sisters rematriated to historical Cherokee Nation.
2. Native grains returning to Indigenous land in Australia too.
3. May need to bring back agricultural practices too, like in Peru.
4. Meanwhile, in India, farmers are trying to grow apples in new places. Go figure.
5. Anyway, seems like the IFOAM Seeds Platform might be able to help.
6. And genebanks too of course, like the Millennium Seed Bank.
7. As part of a comprehensive conservation systems, goes without saying, like in China.
8. Which also include climate-proof protected areas.
9. It worked for soybeans, after all.
10. Well, for now anyway…
Published on June 17, 2025