Research on crofting reveals oppression, not much else

A few days ago a short article in the Farmers Guardian, a British rural newspaper, mentioned what sounds like an interesting research project: “Crofters: Indigenous People of the Highlands and Islands.” Unfortunately, a look at the Scottish Crofting Foundation website doesn’t reveal much more information. It would have been nice to know, for example, whether the project looked at the contribution crofters make to on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity. Surely there was more to the project than a glossy brochure moaning about the oppression of indigenous crofters. Maybe Maria Scholten will be able to tell us.

Meanwhile, in another part of darkest Britain, another traditional lifestyle based on the management and use of agricultural biodiversity — thatching — is having to go through bureaucratic hoops. I’ll let Danny over at Rurality tell you all about it. Would be funny if it wasn’t sad. Traditional doesn’t mean unchanging, guys.

Nibbles: Carnival, farmer schools, zero-till, drought, barley, ag college, organic choc, ICTs

Nibbles: AGRA, Andean potatoes, farmer factsheets, tequila, Dogon, yak milk

Tibet’s seeds must be stored as climate changes

At the risk of offending the nabobs at Macmillan Publishing, I am going to post this letter to Nature in its entirety, because Nature requires one to pay to read it online, and the subject is too important for that. ((And thanks to Hannes Dempewolf for the tip.))

Sir
The Tibet–Qinghai plateau is an area where climate change may have huge effects as glaciers retreat, leading to large decreases in water supply in the mega-rivers of India, southeast Asia and China by the middle of the century. For the 6,000 or more species of higher plants, including the widely admired Himalayan alpines, the effects will be even more severe as vegetation zones move upwards by several hundred metres. The movement of regions suitable for growth will be followed, not accompanied, by the vegetation suited to them, increasing the risk of extinctions.

In Tibet, few of the practices adopted in many other countries are in place. Although there are 38 nature reserves, covering a third of the country, there are no botanical gardens. The preservation of seeds of Tibetan plants is virtually non-existent. The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew in the United Kingdom stores seed from only three Tibetan species, and China’s largest seed bank, the Southwest China Germplasm Bank of Wild Species in the Kunming Institute of Botany, has none.

We and researchers at other institutions are addressing this gap. We hope we’ll be in time.

W. John Cram, China–UK HUST–RRes Genetic Engineering and Genomics Joint Laboratory, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074
Yang Zhong, School of Life Sciences and Center for Evolutionary Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Tashi Tersing, Institute of Biodiversity Science and Geobiology, Tibet University, Lhasa 850000, China
Jie Cai, Millennium Seed Bank Project, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Wakehurst Place, Ardingly, West Sussex RH17 6TN, UK