Policy

April 6, 2021

Genebanks at the summit

The preliminary ideas for transforming the food system, which will, ahem, feed into the UN Food Summit, are out.

https://twitter.com/FoodSystems/status/1377628805787959299

There’s a quite a bit in there about diversity — of crops, production systems and diets — but let me single out the four solutions which explicitly mention genebanks:

Action Track 3.10: Increasing agrobiodiversity for improved production and resilience.
Action Track 3.14: Broadening the genetic base of nature-positive production systems.
Action Track 5.10: Tools of accelerated breeding and trait mining underserved crops.
Action Track 5.21: Long-term conservation of food diversity in gene banks and in the field, and sustained diversification of the food basket.

Not bad, eh?

March 29, 2021March 29, 2021

Brainfood: On farm, Barahnaja, Vegetable landraces, Okra core, Carrot breeding, Soybean breeding, Afghan wheat, Phytochemistry, Cassava diversity, Dietary diversity double, Pollination trade

On-Farm Crop Diversity for Advancing Food Security and Nutrition. Lots of solid context, plus fun and unusual boxes on fe’i bananas, African greens and Vietnam seed clubs.
Mainstreaming Barahnaja cultivation for food and nutritional security in the Himalayan region. Could be another box in the above.
Vegetable Landraces: The “Gene Banks” for Traditional Farmers and Future Breeding Programs. Unusual way to put it, but you can see what they mean.
The World Vegetable Center Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) Core Collection as a Source for Flooding Stress Tolerance Traits for Breeding. It’s the longer vegetative phase that possibly helps with flooding tolerance.
Strategies to Identify and Introgress Production and Quality Traits from Genetic Resources to Elite Carrot Cultivars. But maybe it’s not core collections that you need.
Genomic dissection of widely planted soybean cultivars leads to a new breeding strategy of crops in the post-genomic era. Here’s another core collection, this time of popular cultivars rather than landraces, as a basis for a strategy called Potalaization which seems to amount to starting your breeding programme with a wide genetic base.
Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of Triticum aestivum L. Landrace Panel from Afghanistan. You could select a core collections based on ecogeography. Mainly.
Spatial and evolutionary predictability of phytochemical diversity. Interestingly, the same goes for phytochemical diversity in Swiss grasslands.
DNA fingerprinting reveals varietal composition of Vietnamese cassava germplasm (Manihot esculenta Crantz) from farmers’ field and genebank collections. From 1570 clones to 31 unique genotypes. No need for a core collection then.
Dietary diversity of rural Indonesian households declines over time with agricultural production diversity even as incomes rise. Indonesians need to go back to growing more vegetables. See some of the previous papers for examples. You’re welcome.
The interplay between food market access and farm household dietary diversity in low and middle income countries: A systematic review of literature. Or their market access could be improved, though it’s unclear whether that would improve their diets.
Virtual pollination trade uncovers global dependence on biodiversity of developing countries.
Many diets depend on other people’s pollinators, though.

March 23, 2021March 23, 2021

Nibbles: PGRFA book, PGRFA use, PGRFA database

New book on conserving crop diversity.
New data on genetic gains in banana breeding.
New European database for organic seeds. And more on organic ag in Europe.

March 22, 2021March 22, 2021

Brainfood: DSI, SMTA, Geno-Phenotyping, Adoption ceiling, Vegetable seeds, Neutral diversity, Trait variation, Feed interventions, Polyploidy, Varietal selection, Sugarcane genomes, African supply chains, Farmers Rights, Agroforestry

Bringing access and benefit sharing into the digital age. One thing needed: a Multi‐stakeholder Committee on the Governance of Digital Sequence Information. Well that was easy.
A contract‐law analyses of the SMTA of the Plant Treaty: Can it work as a binding contract? Three things: the SMTA needs to be valid, binding and enforceable. Which it isn’t now, apparently.
Recent Large-Scale Genotyping and Phenotyping of Plant Genetic Resources of Vegetatively Propagated Crops. Five things: standardized SSR loci, GBS-derived SNPs, SNP arrays, high-throughput phenotyping system, GWAS.
“Breaking through the 40% adoption ceiling: Mind the seed system gaps.” A perspective on seed systems research for development in One CGIAR. Four things: capture the demand characteristics of farmers, identify effective seed delivery pathways, ensure seed health and stopping the spread of disease, effective policies and regulation. I guess this is where the Toolkit comes in.
Africa’s evolving vegetable seed sector: status, policy options and lessons from Asia. Four things: technical capacity, regulations, extension, marketing. Well, yeah.
The inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Three things: functional genetic diversity, demographic history, and ecological relationships.
Intraspecific trait variation in plants: a renewed focus on its role in ecological processes. Three things: report individual replicates and population means, investigate mechanisms that affect ITVs, studies that span sub-disciplines (see paper above).
A scoping review of feed interventions and livelihoods of small-scale livestock keepers. Three things: consider absorptive capacity of livestock keepers and extensionists, focus on semi-commercial sector, consider resource requirements of feed options. It’s all in the podcast. Remarkable similarity with the vegetables thing above, eh?
Induced Polyploidy: A Tool for Forage Species Improvement. Two things. Thanks, colchicine.
Varietal selection in marginal agroecological niches and cultural landscapes: the case of rice in the Togo Hills. Three things: participation, low-input conditions, landraces.
Three founding ancestral genomes involved in the origin of sugarcane. A, B and C.
“Essential non‐essentials”: COVID‐19 policy missteps in Nigeria rooted in persistent myths about African food supply chains. Five things: imports are not central to food security, rural families buy a lot of food, small farmers access markets after all, small & medium enterprises are hidden but not missing, domestic distribution is important.
What Should Farmers’ Rights Look Like? The Possible Substance of a Right. 64 things.
The one hundred tree species prioritized for planting in the tropics and subtropics as indicated by database mining. Bingo!

March 17, 2021

Seed sector lays it out

So seed companies have come up with a “Seed Sector Declaration” as a part of their engagement with the UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021.

Among other things, they commit to

CONTINUE our support for the conservation of genetic resources and biodiversity

while asking their partners to

SUPPORT seed sector use of genetic resources, essential to new seed varieties, by supporting improvements to the work of bodies, such as the ITPGRFA and CBD

Can’t help thinking we’ve heard this sort of thing before.