- How nature-related risks matter to business.
- Exhibit A: beer.
- Exhibit B: wine and wine.
- Looking at it the other way, some infographics to sum up the impact of food production on the environment.
- And then there are nature-based solutions…
- Sometimes companies do good just for the hell of it: e.g. ohia conservation in Hawaii.
- And sometimes it just takes family.
- “Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.”
- Some tips on how to communicate all the above.
Yet more on what One CGIAR should do
That list of suggestions to CGIAR from David Lobell last week in Food Policy? It turns out to be one a trio of “viewpoints” on what the new, improved One CGIAR should do. Just to remind you, Dr Lobell said breeding (including of hitherto neglected crops) and precision agronomy.
Dr Rebecca Nelson of Cornell University has somewhat different advice for CGIAR:
- “…break definitively with fossil energy-based intensification and to dedicate itself to agroecological intensification.”
- “…expand its mandate and its networks to support equity, food systems health, and sustainable productivity in agricultural systems around the world.”
- “…bring the power of scientific research to local communities in a networked fashion that builds the global and local evidence base for agroecological intensification.”
- “… tackle agricultural challenges in their larger context… This is necessary because food and agriculture are inseparable from the larger ecological, meteorological, social, and political systems.”
And, finally, there’s Dr Lawrence Haddad of GAIN. According to him, CGIAR needs to:
- “…understand the terrain between farm and fork much better than it does now.”
- fill the gap in “…research on private sector actors” in the food system.
- have “…a greater focus on foods like vegetables, fruits, fish, pulses, nuts, eggs, dairy, and meat.”
- help “…create a safe space to break out of the disciplinary and subject specific silos.”
Do please read all three articles in their entirety, if you can (they’re behind a paywall, I’m afraid), and let us know what you think here. Each is coming from a very different place, and yet they do have one thing in common: a recognition of the importance of agricultural biodiversity. Too bad none of them actually mentioned genebanks.
But then I would say that, wouldn’t I.
LATER: No wait, there’s another one.
Brainfood: AnGR treble, Livestock aDNA, Wild cucurbit gaps, Indian crop diversity, Wild Argentinian spuds, Wild wheat, Tomato domestication, Enset systems, Duckweed collections, Peanut hybrids, Sweet potato leaves, Adaptation pathways, Golden Rice
- Enhancing the functioning of farm animal gene banks in Europe: results of the IMAGE project. Lots going on, but avian species in particular need more work.
- Conservation and Utilization of Livestock Genetic Diversity in the United States of America through Gene Banking. Over 1,000,000 samples from over 55,000 animals, representing 165 livestock and poultry breeds, collected over 60 years, more than 50% of rare breeds.
- Cryoconservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Europe and Two African Countries: A Gap Analysis. Out of the 2949 breeds registered in DAD-IS, 16% have material in genebanks, but only 4% have enough to allow breed reconstitution.
- Unlocking the origins and biology of domestic animals using ancient DNA and paleogenomics. How we got to the above.
- Distributions, conservation status, and abiotic stress tolerance potential of wild cucurbits (Cucurbita L.). 13 out of 16 taxa need in situ and ex situ work.
- Wild potato Genetic Reserves in Protected Areas: prospection notes from Los Cardones National Park, Salta, Argentina. Nice combination of in situ and ex situ.
- Agricultural intensification was associated with crop diversification in India (1947-2014). But only at country level, and not by much. At district level, crop diversity went down in rice/wheat areas and up in the south and west as oilseeds and vegetables replaced millet and sorghum. Doesn’t strike me as positive overall, diversity-wise.
- From population to production: 50 years of scientific literature on how to feed the world. Time for a bit of holism.
- Unlocking the Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of a Wild Gene Source of Wheat, Aegilops biuncialis Vis., and Its Relationship With the Heading Time. 5 ecogeographic clusters, 4 related heading time groups.
- Genomic Evidence for Complex Domestication History of the Cultivated Tomato in Latin America. Domestication of northerly migrating wildish material in Mexico rather than 2-step domestication in S America and then Mexico.
- Enset‐based agricultural systems in Ethiopia: A systematic review of production trends, agronomy, processing and the wider food security applications of a neglected banana relative. Better data needed, for a start.
- Worldwide Genetic Resources of Duckweed: Stock Collections. 36 species, no less. Need more?
- Realizing hybrids between the cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and its distantly related wild species using in situ embryo rescue technique. You need to apply growth substances to the pollinated flowers.
- The remarkable morphological diversity of leaf shape in sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas): the influence of genetics, environment, and G×E. Genetics controls shape, environment size.
- Adaptation and development pathways for different types of farmers. Watch your context, and don’t forget governance.
- Golden Rice and technology adoption theory: A study of seed choice dynamics among rice growers in the Philippines. They forgot context. And governance. But let the author spell it out in a tweet thread.
What should OneCGIAR do?
David Lobell of Stanford University, whose work we have featured here in the past, has a think-piece out called “Principles and priorities for one CGIAR.” For the uninitiated…
OneCGIAR is a dynamic reformulation of CGIAR’s partnerships, knowledge and physical assets – building on an energized, interconnected, and diverse global talent pool. It aims to drive major progress in key areas where innovation is needed to deliver on the SDGs by 2030, anchored in more unified governance, institutions, country engagement, and funding.
Anyway, David thinks the new, improved OneCGIAR should focus on just two things. The first is kind of obvious:
…continued investment in breeding, a longstanding strength of the system. Progress on flagship crops such as wheat and rice will be needed, especially in the face of climate change. For example, maintenance breeding to protect against evolving diseases and pests will be ever more important, as will finding varieties that can withstand heat extremes. Equally important, however, will be to expand work on the many other crops that are grown by poor farmers throughout the world. Historically, these “orphan” crops have received far less attention than major internationally traded crops, but many compelling reasons exist to expand efforts on these crops, including (i) their potential value in addressing micronutrient deficiency (“hidden hunger”), for which less progress has been made than for calorie deficiency in many regions (Gödecke et al., 2018); (ii) the ability of nitrogen-fixing legumes to reverse soil degradation in a cost-effective way (Vanlauwe et al., 2019), a critical need for improving productivity and fertilizer responsiveness in many smallholder fields; (iii) the ability of many orphan crops, such as pigeonpea, cowpea, and cassava, to withstand increasingly frequent extreme heat and drought conditions, and (iv) the prospects that new technologies like genomic selection and gene editing will dramatically reduce the cost of working on orphan crops, especially given recent progress in sequencing many of their genomes (Dawson et al., 2019).
Nice to see orphan crops being highlighted in this way, as we often do here. And of course the international genebanks underpin the CGIAR’s breeding, although David doesn’t mention them. David’s proposed second priority is perhaps more surprising:
…precision agronomy, often also referred to as site-specific or digital agronomy. In food insecure regions, productivity gains from improved management are often far greater than from improved genetics. Yet spurring adoption of a new seed has typically been easier than a new set of practices (Stevenson et al., 2019). Part of the reason is that the ideal management depends a lot on local soil, weather, plot history, and economic conditions, and many “best-practice” recommendations fail to deliver profits for a large fraction of farmers (Jayne et al., 2018).
However, new technologies will help to much more quickly diagnose the major needs at subnational and even field scales. For example, spectrometers can be used to rapidly measure soil deficiencies (Viscarra Rossel and Bouma, 2016), photos from mobile phones can be used to diagnose canopy stresses (see Fig. 1), and satellite imagery can be used to identify fields most likely to benefit from specific inputs or practices (Jain et al., 2019). These existing examples, many of which involve CGIAR scientists, are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As the different data streams grow and become integrated, it is plausible that every smallholder in the world could have access to recommendations with a high probability of boosting yields and profits. Although some of this can be achieved by the private sector, my view is that a major investment by CGIAR, along with national partners, would help to ensure that poor farmers can quickly benefit from these technologies.
Again, this is an area that we have occasionally discussed here, in particular the usefulness of high-resolution spatial datasets. 2
I haven’t seen any replies to David’s suggestions yet, but I’m sure they’re in the works and we’ll be on the lookout for them.
Brainfood: Potato genebanks, Aichi 11, Taming foxes, Fruit diversity, Polyploidy review, Evaluating quinoa, Into Africa, IPCC review, Desiccation tolerance, Pig diversity, Oolong diversity, Wild millet, Sustainable diets
- Ex Situ Conservation of Potato [Solanum Section Petota (Solanaceae)] Genetic Resources in Genebanks. The only review of the subject you’ll need. Until the next one.
- Editorial Essay: An update on progress towards Aichi Biodiversity Target 11. Not bad, but the difficult stuff remains difficult. One of several interesting papers.
- The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome. Those Russian foxes were already pretty tame. Here’s a Twitter tread from one of the authors that lays it all out.
- Developing fruit tree portfolios that link agriculture more effectively with nutrition and health: a new approach for providing year-round micronutrients to smallholder farmers. 11 species can address micronutrient gaps.
- Plant Polyploidy: Origin, Evolution, and Its Influence on Crop Domestication. Extreme events and disasters drive polyploidy, which drives diversification at various levels, which facilitates domestication.
- Spectral Reflectance Indices and Physiological Parameters in Quinoa under Contrasting Irrigation Regimes. Phenotyping for drought tolerance from space.
- Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments. Via NE Africa always something new.
- Invited review: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture, and food — A case of shifting cultivation and history. The IPCC could have done a better job of synthesizing the data on the impact of climate change on crops and livestock.
- Seed comparative genomics in three coffee species identify desiccation tolerance mechanisms in intermediate seeds. Whole bunch of genes involved.
- Capturing genetic diversity – an assessment of the nation’s gene bank in securing Duroc pigs. Genebank doing a pretty good job in this case.
- Genetic diversity of oolong tea (Camellia sinensis) germplasms based on the nanofluidic array of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. It’s not all the same.
- Tapping Pennisetum violaceum, a wild relative of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), for resistance to blast (caused by Magnaporthe grisea) and rust (caused by Puccinia substriata var. indica). Out of 305 accessions, one was resistant to both diseases. IP21711 if you must know. A few more were resistant to one or the other disease.
- Can Diets Be Healthy, Sustainable, and Equitable? No, and they’ll be difficult to change, but the “burden of change should not be solely placed on the consumer’s ability to make healthy choices.”