Threats

April 20, 2009January 21, 2020

Nibbles: Pepper, Persimmons, Prosopis, Bio-banking

Is Kampot pepper the best in the world?
How the Japanese deal with persimmons.
Making the Atacama bloom. Sort of.
Bio-banking is all well and good, but will it be applicable to agrobiodiversity as well as orchids and pandas?

Wouldn’t you know it. That Kampot pepper link has rotted away. But you can still find the original thanks to The Wayback Machine.

April 17, 2009June 28, 2009

Nibbles: Taro, NTFP, Maca, Perils of new crops, Nabhan, Cockfighting, Old wine, Maya nut, Cassava Brown Streak Virus

University of Hawaii’s work on taro summarized.
Watch out for FAO’s new NWFP-Digest. Non-timber, non-wood; what’s the difference?
The transition of maca from neglect to market prominence. Free download.
Maize and malaria in Ethiopia.
Gary Nabhan interviewed. Again.
NPR on the limits of the Green Revolution.
Cocks still fighting in India.
The early Egyptians “…were very aware of the benefits that natural additives can haveâ€”especially if dissolved into an alcoholic medium, like wine or beer.”
Brosimum alicastrum to the rescue.
Uganda’s biofuel hopes dashed by virus? Say it aint so.

April 16, 2009April 17, 2009

Melaku Worede speaks

And this is what the veteran crop conservationist says:

Gene banks like the SADC gene bank, the Svalbard gene bank, and many others, focus only on collecting and preserving. How can you think you are conserving diversity when the very source upon which the seeds depend is not included? You can capture only so much, and in 100 years it will be useless because the planet will have changed. Perhaps you will be able to incorporate some genetic material into varieties and release them, but who is going to benefit from that? That is the big question.

I know what he means. You need to conserve the process, as well as the product. But I have another big question. If the world — read the climate — is changing as fast as many now fear, don’t you need the insurance policy that genebanks provide all the more?

April 16, 2009April 16, 2009

GMO introgression risk mapped

Bioversity International’s Gene Flow Risk Assessment of Genetically Engineered Crops project, funded by GTZ and realized in collaboration with CIAT and Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), has got (some of) its products out. The project focused on the “likelihood of gene flow and introgression to crop wild relatives (CWR) and other domesticated species.” A book is coming, but you can see the risk maps for a number of crops online now. And there’s also a bibliography.

LATER: Jeremy points out, correctly, that “see” in the last sentence above is a bit of an overstatement. You need to do a bit more work than is perhaps implied.

April 6, 2009

A dangerous business

Farmers are finding themselves in the front lines. In Gaza. And on the southern island of Sulu in the Philippines. And no doubt elsewhere around the world. The problems in Sulu also affect the nearby Zamboanga peninsula, home of one of the major coconut genebanks of the world, at the Philippines Coconut Authority‘s Zamboanga Research Centre.