Threats

March 19, 2009March 19, 2009

Bhutan agricultural statistics go online

Yes, that’s what the news item said, and it got me all excited. So I rushed off to SINGER first to see if there’s any germplasm from that country in the international collections, and if any of that was geo-referenced. And I was happy to find some 30 barleys at ICARDA, strung all along the main road, from east to west.

And so then I went off to CountrySTAT-Bhutan to see how well this material covered the distribution of the crop. The results were a little weird. This is the distribution of barley cultivation in Bhutan in 2005.

As you can see, the crop is concentrated in the west of the country, whereas in 1981, when the ICARDA collection was made, that seemed not to be the case. Ok, things change. The oldest data in CountrySTAT-Bhutan is 1999, but the pattern is the same.

Has the distribution of barley in Bhutan really changed so drastically in the past 30 years or so? And if so, what has that done to genetic diversity? Have the landraces formerly found in the east migrated, or are they only to be found in genebanks now?

March 17, 2009March 17, 2009

Ghanaian women not ready for biofuels

“Destruction of economic trees such as shea-nut and dawadawa trees actually deny community members, especially women their source of livelihood. It also restricts the hitherto extensive traditional rearing of animals in the affected communities.”

Bad news alert, from AllAfrica.com.

March 15, 2009March 13, 2009

Human beings don’t need honeybee pollination

Yes, but “quality of life in a developed economy does.” I got the quote via a post at LEISA’s Farm which makes the point that most information on the recent bee die-off has come from the USA and Europe. If you know of similar observations from other part of the world, let them know (leisasfarm at gmail.com).

March 13, 2009March 14, 2009

Agriculture blogged in Copenhagen

Climate Feedback is a blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming.

There’s not a huge amount on agriculture normally, but a post yesterday from the Copenhagen conference mentions not one but two people whose (independent) work on the effect of climate change on agriculture we’ve mentioned a number of times, Marshall Burke from Stanford and Andy Jarvis from Bioversity International.

March 13, 2009March 14, 2009

Iraqis let down again

Talking of disasters… Drought, salinity, violence, higher paying jobs in construction, the Coalition Provisional Authority and its Order 81, a corrupt Australian; and before that Saddam Hussein and the embargo: Iraqi agriculture has had a lot to deal with over the years. ¹ The genetic erosion must have been phenomenal. But there’s always ex situ, right? Well:

ICARDA scientists are uncertain … about the fate of Iraq’s research facilities, especially its genebank. Prior to the war, the Abu Ghraib national genebank contained some 1,400 accessions of different crops. According to Shideed, virtually all of the country’s agricultural research centers have been destroyed or severely damaged. Large quantities of genetic materials for crops and livestock animals are feared lost, he said.

We now know that the Iraqi genebank was in fact destroyed, but that copies of the material had previously been sent to ICARDA. I wish I could say that such ex situ collections of Iraqi material maintained around the world are adequate in the face of what’s been happening there. But SINGER gives 1147 accessions, 402 of which geo-referenced, and these are all from the north of the country.

And GRIN returns 1150 hits. I just don’t think that can possibly fully represent the diversity that was present in even the main staples 20-30 years ago, let along the vegetables and fruits.

Ok, it’s probably not all gone on farm. But who’s going to go out and collect it?