I’ve been kinda quiet lately due to illness last week and then going on vacation to Athens for a few days earlier this week. Here’s a taster of the holiday snaps. More later, on an agrobiodiversity theme, of course.
Oh, and happy Earth Day!
China’s Germplasm Bank of Wild Species gets a visit
GoKunming, which seems to be a semi-official English-language site about the capital and largest city of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, has a feature today on the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species (中国西南野生生物种质资源库) at the Kunming Institute of Botany. It’s a nice write-up, although we would take issue with parts of the following statement:
Why is cooperation between the world’s seedbanks important? Staff at Kunming’s seedbank told us that during the recent social upheaval in Egypt, the country’s seedbank suffered looting (for the jars, not the seeds), which led to the destruction of many valuable specimens. Luckily, the seedbank had sent backup specimens to its partners abroad.
Though there has been extensive damage to equipment, I don’t think any evidence has been presented of the looting of jars from the Egyptian Deserts Genebank, if that is indeed the one referred to, or of the destruction of specimens, valuable or otherwise. And of course, although some accessions stored in that genebank were in fact duplicated, in particular at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, not all were. But it is nice to see the point about cooperation among genebanks made so clearly.
Just for completeness, the national crop, as opposed to wild species, genebank of China is in Beijing (left). China has not yet ratified the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
A coconut impostor unmasked
Are you one of those that gets upset when a film-maker, say, tries to get one part of the world to stand in for another without giving a thought to the possibility that the respective floras might be entirely different? I’m afraid I am, and many a movie supposedly set in Africa, for example, has been spoiled for me when I realized, by looking at the plants, that it was filmed in Hawaii or Costa Rica.
Roland Bourdeix has the same problem, if the recent exchange on the Cococnut Google Group is anything to go by.
Roland received the following postcard from Guadeloupe.
Fair enough for most people, but being the coconut expert he is, Roland immediately realized that the photograph depicted Tahiti Red Dwarf (also called Rangiroa Red Dwarf or Haari Papua). Problem is, that variety is not recorded from Guadeloupe. So, either it has been very recently introduced, or, more probably, according to Roland, the postcard company simply used a picture of a coconut from another country, perhaps French Polynesia, and passed it off as being from Guadeloupe. And nearly got away with it…
Nibbles: Desert legumes, BiH, Seedbombs, Workshops on food security, Mandrake, Productivity, Peppers, Cockles, Cassava
- Desert seeds go to Svalbard.
- “Two young engineers, Fuad Gasi and Idin Fazlic, are in charge of the bank, which is staffed by volunteers.”
- Seedbombs: recipes and legal niceties.
- Achieving food security sustainably. Report of a PAR/FAO workshop.
- On the other hand, here’s what Australia’s leaders heard about A Food Secure World.
- How much do you really need to know about mandrake?
- Do rich countries produce more per hectare? h/t GOOD
- Pocket guides to chili farming. Might have a wider audience than originally intended.
- Collecting cockles is women’s work, at least in Ecuador.
- Why would anyone want to eat it when they could use cassava for biofuel instead?
The VIR Department of Biotechnology, Pushkin
The VIR Department of Biotechnology, Pushkin, a set on Flickr.
You may remember a post a few months back at Vaviblog describing a paper on the Vavilov’s Institute’s potato collection. I recently had the pleasure of meeting one of the authors, Dr Tatjana Gavrilenko, for the first time, and in her natural habitat to boot. Here are the results.