Wheat being nudged and prodded into perenniality, and local perennials the other way ((That’s the Land Institute stuff we’ve blogged about before.)); cows managed like bison, and bison managed like cows (including by media moguls turned restauranteurs); reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand, and Indian retirees going home to the reservation; farmers paid to retire some of their acres so grasslands can make a comeback, and high-tech plants turning corn into diapers. There sure is some funny stuff going on in the Great Plains, that sixth of the continental US between the foothills of the Rockies and the 98th (or possibly the 100th) parallel. Read all about it in National Geographic’s Change of Heartland. The feature is from a couple of years ago, but still well worth checking out, if only for the photos. And thanks to Kem and her friend for pointing it out to me.
War bad for seeds, seeds good for peace
We asked Jacob van Etten to write about war and agricultural biodiversity after seeing his great website. It’s just coincidence that he sent the following piece in right after we blogged about flooding and genetic erosion. Sometimes things work out that way. Thanks, Jacob. We’re always open to guest contributions…
War can be disastrous for the environment. Think about forest destruction in Kurdistan or burning oil wells in Iraq. But we know very little about agrobiodiversity losses caused by armed conflict. Some time ago, a team of geographers wrote an alarming article about maize biodiversity in Guatemala, where a war raged in the 1980s. They claimed that war and modernization had caused a massive disappearance of indigenous maize varieties. This was based on a quick study of several townships.
However, in a recent restudy, which involved more intensive sampling in a single township, it became clear that several maize varieties were still hiding in the corners. Variety loss was in fact rather low and no varieties were reported to be lost due to the war. What seemed to have changed over the last decades was the social distribution of seeds and knowledge, suggestive of a disrupted social exchange network.
As other studies in Rwanda and West Africa have given similar results, a general picture seems to emerge. The problem is often not the physical survival of seeds and varieties during war. They may be conserved by those who stay in the village or recovered after the violence from fields and secret storages. The main problem is that war destroys the social and economic tissue that underpins agricultural diversity management. Mistrust and poverty will limit the circulation of seeds, leading to access problems and a fragmented local knowledge system. There may thus be a lot of sense in a project of CARE by Sierra Leone that turned the problem of seeds and war on its head. It used the distribution of seeds as a way to evoke discussion on the principles of social exclusion and the causes of the armed conflict.
To cull or not to cull
Apparently the argument about whether it’s a good idea or not to cull badgers in areas of bovine TB incidence in the UK is not over yet. Now a farmer weighs in. Well whatever next!
Fruit genebank follow-up
We’ve been trying to keep an eye on the threat to the fruit tree genebank built up by the Horticulture and Agroforestry Research Programme (HARP) in Jharkhand State, India, with limited success.
A quick recap: State parliamentarians plan to force HARP off its land and bulldoze the field genebank of more than 5000 trees, to build themselves fancy bungalows.
The Indian press has mostly been concerned with the whiff of corruption. A couple of days after the original report, the chief Minister of Jharkhand was busy denying that any decision had been taken over the land; the Indian Express quoted documents that suggested otherwise. A week later, the paper had more documents, claiming that the HARP land was worth about 25,000 times more than some previous land that had been earmarked for the bungalows but rejected by the parliamentarians. The research station was more or less ignored, save for a claim by Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, in a letter to Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda, that scientists had been threatened, an incident Pawar described as “very sad” and “objectionable”.
Then came a bombshell, a leaked email from Cary Fowler, the Executive Secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to the Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, HARP’s parent organisation, who serves on the Board of the Trust. ((Extensive investigations have failed to uncover any evidence that the leak emanated from the Trust.)) According to the Indian Express, Fowler asked informally whether “something can be done”.
And this, for us, is the nub of the matter.
Politicians enriching themselves by taking advantage of their position is business as usual, and a matter for the local electorate. And believing that fancy bungalows are more valuable than a collection of tropical fruit diversity is further confirmation that these politicians are nothing out of the ordinary.
As far as I’m concerned, they can have their land and their bungalows. That’s between them, their voters and the local constabulary.
What I want to know is: what are the plans for the collection? It takes time to graft trees and to strike cuttings, if, indeed, those are feasible options. It takes time to find new land. Is there time? Or, as the headlines insinuate, are the bulldozers already moving in on the land? ((There seems to be one local blogger who might be able to dig up answers, but no way of contacting him. So if you see this, Ashok K.Jha or Mithila Darpan, get in touch with us.))
Bacterial infection causes fungal resistance
Some root colonizing bacteria have been found to have beneficial effects on plant growth, and have thus been dubbed plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR). Now Indian researchers have grown pigeonpea with and without a couple of different strains of PGPR, and also with and without rhizobium infection, and have then infected the plants with the fungus that causes wilt. ((S. Dutta, A.K. Mishra and B.S. Dileep Kumar. Induction of systemic resistance against fusarial wilt in pigeon pea through interaction of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria and rhizobia. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 11 October 2007))
It turns out that pigeonpea plants infected with either PGPR or rhizobium developed “induced systemic resistance” to the fungus. But the resistance was actually best when both were present. I found this pretty amazing, but actually some googling reveals that it’s not that weird. It may have something to do with the increased levels of phenols in the leaves of bacterized plants. Or the reduced production of fusaric acid by the pathogen. In any case, “the results promise the combined use of PGPR and rhizobia for induction of systemic resistance against fusarial wilt in pigeon pea.” They are also another pretty amazing example of the interactions among agrobiodiversity.