Category: Threats

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Lightning strikes coconuts twice (and more)

I’m still in the Philippines, but I’ve moved from rice to coconuts. That’s in terms of what I’m discussing, not what I’m eating. I’m participating in a meeting of the curators of the five different regional components of the International Coconut Genebank, organized by COGENT. There’s a lot of interesting stuff coming out, but what I wanted to share with you now (it’s actually the afternoon tea break) is something that was shown earlier today ((By Roland Bourdeix of CIRAD.)) to illustrate the problems that conservation of coconuts in field genebanks can face.

The image below comes from Google Earth and shows a small piece of one of the largest and most important coconut genebanks in the world, at the Marc Delorme Research Station just outside Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Those large gaps in the otherwise beautifully laid out genebank were caused by lightning strikes! The labourers grow their cassava there now. I’d never heard of this particular threat to ex situ conserved agrobiodiversity. This particular parcel seems to have been particularly unlucky, attracting strikes repeatedly over the years.

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Colony Collapse Disorder: who knows?

Maybe ours was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but beekeeper Felicia Gilljam has now blogged her thoughts on Colony Collapse Disorder. Being scientifically cautious, I suspect, there’s a disclaimer: “Because I’m a beekeeper, apparently my opinion is considered ‘expert’.” More expert than many another commenter, I reckon. I’ll let you read it over there, but the executive summary is that Felicia is not sure how real the phenomenon is, especially in Europe. And perhaps the virus that has been associated with CCD gets a purchase because something else weakens the hive. She also raises the intriguing possibility that breeding bees to be better harvesters that are docile and don’t swarm may have brought along some other effects — like a weaker immune system — as hitchhikers.

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A shattered genebank slowly comes back to life

You may remember Typhoon Xangsane, which hit the Philippines in deadly fashion just over a year ago, on 28 September 2006.  It was given the Tagalog name Milenyo, or Millennium.

What you may not know is that one of the victims of Milenyo was the national genebank of the Philippines — the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory — which is housed by the Institute of Plant Breeding in Los Baños. ((The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is also in Los Baños, of course, but although some of its facilities were also affected by Milenyo, its genebank was not damaged.))

Some of the results of the typhoon can be seen in the photo essay published by GRAIN not long after the event. Some 70% of the national collection was declared lost and the rest taken next door to IRRI for emergency storage under “black box” conditions.

I visited the genebank last Friday, and the recovery has definitely made some progress, including as a result of some timely financial assistance by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. But there’s still some way to go: much of the collection is still at IRRI for safe keeping.

In this picture, Nestor, who works at the genebank, shows how high the water got on that fateful day. You can also see, closer to the ground, the mark left by the mud which flowed through the building.

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Continue reading “A shattered genebank slowly comes back to life”

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Some people don’t want to register their traditional knowledge

The ingratitude! Apparently villagers in the Uttar Kannada district of the Western Ghats in India have not been entirely truthful with the folks collecting information for the local Biodiversity Register. These registers have been promoted as a way of collecting local traditional knoweldge in order to protect against biopiracy and give local people some sort of intellectual property rights. But, like jealous cooks at a bake-off, some seem to withholding information.

“People have not given details of prescriptions, compositions and the methods used to cure ailments the traditional way using plants with medicinal properties. The information we have might be incomplete. In some cases, people have just mentioned plants but haven’t revealed how they use them for treatment.”

That’s according to G M Bhatt, president of the Biodiversity Management Committee of Heggarni. Villagers say they fear that they will lose control of their knowledge and their resources, even if it is “protected” in a biodiversity register.

They may have a point. According to the report, when it was discovered that a local plant, Malabar tamarind (Garcinia gummigutta), contained a compound that could “cure obesity” it was rapidly overharvested and is now in short supply. (That could well be true; the GEF Small Grants Programme funds a project on the conservation and domestication of G. gummigutta.)

What I wonder is, where did villagers ever get the idea that their local resources might be open to overexploitation?