Category: Threats

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Swedes get a load of Pavlovsk

Dagens Nyheter, A Swedish newspaper, ran a big spread on the Pavlovsk Experiment Station on 5 September. We asked our own favourite Swede to do us a precis. Thanks Britta.

The article is quite basic — after all the audience is the general Swedish public. It is nevertheless well written and presents several arguments for why Pavlovsk should be saved for the future, as well as an overview of the station’s history and past, and why it is now under threat of destruction.

Dagens Nyheter (DN, “Today’s News”) obviously finds the topic interesting as it has sent two people to the Vavilov Institute and Pavlovsk to do their own research and also to join The Committee from Moscow, which visited Pavlovsk on direct Presidential request to investigate if it would be possible to move the the material elsewhere.

Karin Bojs, the author, who is a science journalist, says that there are two big reasons why biologists, agronomists and other individuals are objecting to the plans to turn the area into luxury housing complexes, and now speak out to save Pavlovsk. One reason is the biodiversity that the station houses, the other is the science history that surrounds Russion genebank, including Pavlovsk.

Leonid Burmistrov, Research director at Pavlovsk. Photo by Magnus Hallgren, DN.se
Leonid Burmistrov, head of research at Pavlovsk. Photo by Magnus Hallgren, DN.se

The reporters met with Sergej Alexanian at Vavilov headquarters and with Leonid Burmistrov, who is the head of research at Pavlovsk. Burmistrov says that some of the current project aims are to find genes to solve the biggest problems: resistance to fungal diseases and cold tolerance. Moreover, of course the berries and the fruit need to taste good.

The background and history of Nikolay Vavilov and the Institute that bears his name are described; Vavilov’s travels around the world, his work on genetics and centres of origin, including the story of how scientists starved to death during the siege of Leningrad while sitting in front of bags filled with oats, peas and beans, saving this material and treasuring it beyond their own lives.

Karin Bojs says that everyone seems to agree that the Pavlovsk station houses extremely valuable genetic diversity. The question is whether the material can safely be moved, or not. Staff of the Vavilov institute claim it would be impossible, and they are supported in their claims by international organisations like Bioversity International and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Sergej Alexanian believes that now that the members of Medvedev’s committee have seen with their own eyes, they too would agree on the difficulties and understand that moving all those trees is not an option.

The bottom line is that there is hope that the Vavilov institute, which has survived the Stalin terror and the siege of Leningrad, has a fair chance of making it through also this chapter of Russian history.

Background:

  • Dec 2009 – Russian authorities decide to transfer 90 hectares of farmland managed by the Vavilov Institute to a trust for housing development.
  • [April 2010 Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog draws attention to the problem. Ed.]
  • June 2010 – Cary Fowler visits Pavlovsk and raises media interest. New Scientist article. Thousands of internet signatures for the cause.
  • 11 August 2010 – A court in Moscow rules that the matter has been handled correctly and that the building trust has full rights to the land. Pavlovsk staff can no longer weed the grounds, replant or chase away fruit thieves.
  • 12 August 2010 – The save Pavlovsk campaign intensifies and is also run on Twitter. More than 30,000 individuals have signed protest letters.
  • 13 August – President Medvedev informs that he will look into the matter.
  • 31 August – A committe with representatives from different stakeholders and institutes travels to Pavlovsk to investigate if it would be possible to move the plants.
  • 9 September – Russian Accounts Chamber says it will visit Pavlovsk on 15 September. Ed.
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A Pavlovsk lifeline

You’ll remember that the Russian Housing Development Foundation wants to build a luxury housing project on the site of the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry’s (VIR) unique fruit and berry germplasm collection at the Pavlovsk Experimental Station near St Petersburg. And that the conservation community has been trying to assist VIR’s staff via a petition in their attempts to stop this wanton destruction. Well…

…mounting pressure from scientists has now resulted in at least partial success. The RHDF has announced to ask an independent international expert commission to evaluate the situation at Pavlovsk before proceeding with its plans. Moreover, the Russian Accounts Chamber, a body controlling federal budgets, has announced to inspect the station on 15 September.

Great news indeed. But we’re not out of the woods yet. ((As it were.)) It’s undoubtedly a victory, but we need to keep that pressure up.

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Nibbles: Cattle nutrition, Maize, Freshwater biota, Modeling maize, Rice, Book, Veg, Urban ag

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Is there really no downside to Brazil’s agricultural miracle?

It’s not easy to explain the Brazilian agricultural miracle to a lay audience in a couple of magazine pages, and The Economist makes a pretty good fist of it. It points out that the astonishing increase in crop and meat production in Brazil in the past ten to fifteen year — and it is astonishing, more that 300% by value — has come about due to an expansion in the amount of land under the plow, sure, but much more so due to an increase in productivity. It rightly heaps praise on Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research corporation, for devising a system that has made the cerrado, Brazil’s hitherto agronomically intractable savannah, so productive. It highlights the fact that a key part of that system is improved germplasm — of Brachiaria, soybean, zebu cattle — originally from other parts of the world, incidentally helping make the case for international interdependence in genetic resources. ((Alas, soybean is not part of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture’s system of access and benefit sharing, which means that exchange of germplasm is still guided by the relatively cumbersome rules of the Convention on Biological Diversity.)) And much more.

What it resolutely does not do is give any sense of the cost of all this. I don’t mean the monetary cost, though it would have been nice for policy makers to be reminded that agricultural research does cost money, though the potential returns are great. The graph shows what’s been happening to Embrapa’s budget of late. A billion reais of agricultural research in 2006 bought 108 billion reais of crop production.

But I was really thinking of environmental and social costs. The Economist article says that Brazil is “often accused of levelling the rainforest to create its farms, but hardly any of this new land lies in Amazonia; most is cerrado.” So that’s all right then. No problem at all if 50% of one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots has been destroyed. ((Home to some of the wild relatives of the peanut, for example.)) After all, it’s not the Amazon. A truly comprehensive overview of Brazil’s undoubted agricultural successes would surely cast at least a cursory look at the downside, if only to say that it’s all been worth it. Especially since plans are afoot to export the system to the African savannah. And it’s not as if the information is not out there.

A final observation. One key point the article makes is that the success of the agricultural development model used in the cerrado is that farms are big.

Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms.

Well, leave aside for a moment whether it is empirically true that big means efficient and small inefficient in farming. Leave aside also the issue of with regard to what efficiency is being measured, and whether that makes any sense. Leave all that aside. I would not be surprised if millions of subsistence farming families around the world were to concede that what they did was not particularly efficient. But I think they would find it astonishing — and not a little insulting — to see their daily struggles described as a hobby.

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Medvedev buys Pavlovsk some time?

On 31st of August 2010 Pavlovsk Experiment Station of VIR had an unscheduled inspection. The station was visited by representatives of the Public Chamber, the Accounts Chamber as well as representatives of the Russian Housing Development Foundation. This inspection was a result of instruction given by Dmitry Medvedev for this situation to be scrutinized. After visiting two plots the commission was convinced that, indeed, the disputed plots harbor plants that make a part of the Vavilov collection of plant genetic resources. As a result of field inspection — Nadezhda Shkolkina reports — representatives of the RZhS Fund stated they will postpone an auction for an uncertain period.

Hot off the press. A light at the end of the tunnel? Fingers crossed. But let’s keep up the pressure!