Category: Threats

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Jigawa experiments with cattle diversity

About 30,000 cows drawn from different species will be used in Jigawa state for artificial insemination experiment before the end of May this year, the state commissioner of agriculture, Alhaji Nasidi Ali has said.

Ok, I suppose he meant breeds rather than species. Although a follow up quote from the commissioner adds that: “We want to change the species and varieties of cows in Jigawa state.” Anyway, one has to wonder what this will do to whatever local breeds ((There are also lists of local breeds from ILRI and FAO.)) roam around Jigawa State, Nigeria. The recent State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture did not paint a rosy global picture, you’ll recall.

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Mautam!

Once every 48 years, forests of the bamboo known as Melocanna baccifera go into exuberant flower in parts of northeast India. And then, like clockwork, the event is invariably followed by a plague of black rats that spring from nowhere to spread destruction and famine in their wake. For the first time on film, NOVA and National Geographic capture this massive rat population explosion in the kind of vivid detail not possible in 1959, when the last invasion occurred.

Sounds like a must-watch. Via.

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Using wild rice to fight pests

Well, maybe. The article in The Monitor is a bit confused. Yes, there are wild rices in Uganda. I know because I was (marginally) involved in the 1997 Sida-IRRI project which collected wild Oryza in Eastern and Southern Africa. The material has been conserved since then in the National Genetic Plant Resources Centre for Crops in Entebbe, and has now been evaluated — successfully, it would seem — for resistance to Yellow Mottle Virus. Which is great. But the crossing with cultivated rice has not started in Uganda, I don’t think. The crosses that are alluded to in the article seem rather to have been between Asian rice and cultivated African rice (Oryza glaberrima), presumably aiming to replicate the success of Nerica in West Africa. Anyway, good luck to Drs John Mulumba Wasswa and Jimmy Lamo with the breeding programme.

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Nibbles: Berries, Women, Marsh Arabs, Maple, Sorghum, Nuts, Conference, Banana

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More on mapping agrobiodiversity threats

Hot on the heels of a map showing how warfare has spared hardly any biodiversity hotspot in the past 50 years comes one on another possible threat to agricultural biodiversity. UNESCO has just announced the publication of its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There’s a great interactive website all ready for people to start playing with. Below is a screen shot (there doesn’t seem to be a way to export maps, alas) showing critically endangered languages with fewer than 50 speakers in South and Central America. Worldwide there are 318 such languages.

map1

I’d say a disappearing language was a pretty good proxy for risk of crop genetic erosion. So much to mash up, so little time.