Following on from Luigi’s post a month or so back about the probable return of the chestnut to American woods, two stories, on consecutive days, from the Christian Science Monitor. One gives more information about the complex breeding programme that involves Chinese chestnuts, resistant American trees and lots of painstaking crosses to produce blight-resistant chestnuts. That work has been going on since the early 1980s, and may now be close to complete. A few days earlier, the paper reported on the threat to the Eastern Hemlock, a woolly bug, originally from East Asia. Adelges tsugae has been slowly spreading across the US, where the only hope seems to be a decent cold winter. The fear is that the Eastern Hemlock will go the same way as the Carolina Hemlock, which once shared the forests with the American chestnut and which, experts fear, could now be eaten out of existence.
Battling risk
Here’s how Jeffrey Sachs starts a recent article in Scientific American:
Life at the bottom of the world’s income distribution is massively risky. Households lack basic buffers — saving accounts, health insurance, water tanks, diversified income sources and so on — against droughts, pests and other hazards. The bodies of the poor often lack enough nutrients to rebuff diseases. Even modest shocks, such as a temporary dry spell or a routine infection, can be devastating.Â
He uses this platform to launch a plea for innovative forms of insurance, things like weather-linked bonds combined with other financial services for farmers. The Millennium Village of Sauri in Kenya has apparently been having some encouraging experiences with such instruments, and they certainly seem worth exploring and testing. Anything that helps farmers manage risk must be welcome.
But what about the best agricultural insurance policy of all? What about agricultural biodiversity, in all its guises? Not much — or any, in fact — talk about agrobiodiversity from Prof. Sachs, beyond that “and so on.”
“Sex tree” threatened
Ugandans are overexploiting “a natural Viagra”, Citropsis articulata.
Liberian rice farmers can’t get hold of seeds
Risk of (more) rice genetic erosion in Liberia?
Bee shortage? What bee shortage?
An article in the New York Times this week suggests that the current scare over colony collapse disorder is nothing extraordinary. It has happened before and will probably happen again. What has been missing from the debate, some scientists say, is historical context. Records show that colonies were vanishing in the 19th century, when the cause was seen as lack of moral fibre. Bees that weren’t returning to their hives had “weak character”. And it happened in the late 1970s, when it was called “disappearing disease”. The disease too disappeared, and no cause was ever isolated.
One day we may know, and extra money for long-term monitoring (none has been forthcoming) may help. In the meantime, if the “crisis” has helped people appreciate the importance of bees as pollinators, and prompted deeper investigations, then that is surely A Good Thing. To prove the point, two deeply fascinating papers have been published in the past month showing that genetic diversity in honeybees and other social insects is also A Good Thing.
This is counterintuitive, because the reason social insects are social is that they are genetically uniform.