- Boffins to rice: Pump it Up!
- Saving the nuts of Central Asia.
- Nepali women abandon hybrids for landraces and community seedbanks. Weird thing is that it’s a WWF project. But where are the extensionists? If only they had listened in Bhutan. Ok that packed a lot of links in there.
- Never saw an invasive I didn’t like.
- Architectural theorist tackles wine. Not many people hurt.
- Turns out 57 insect species can play host to that famous medicinal fungus that led to war between Tibetan communities a couple of years back. Which helps how?
- An envelope is opened at FAO.
- Seeds come to South Sudan. One hopes they are of the right kinds. And that somebody is collecting what was there before. Maybe someone should call WWF.
- You want vegetables with your fish?
- Crops for the Future says not all middlemen bad.
The fate of the global jute collection
I think a brief follow-up to yesterday’s foray down Memory Lane might be in order, lest you all go away thinking that I’ve lost my marbles. So, yes, according to Ramnath’s comment I was right, the large, global collection of jute assembled at the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute starting in the 70s did indeed receive a sort of blessing from IBPGR (the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources) in the late 1980s when it became part of the Global Network of Base Collections. It wasn’t on the list in 1985. But it had made it by the time of the IBPGR Annual report for 1989. I know that because googling threw up a link to the paper “Plant Genetic Resources Activities: International Perspective” by R.K Arora, R.S. Paroda and J.M.M. Engels, and that includes a handy table. Alas, that link, which should take one to Bioversity International’s (that’s what IBPGR became) website, is broken. Fortunately, the cache is there, at least for a while, and I have been able to save the paper as a pdf for you.
We don’t hear much about the Global Network of Base Collections any more. It would be interesting to know if the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute still feels itself to be part of it. I suspect not. Of course, things have changed a lot since 1989. But what’s to stop BJRI proposing to place its collection under Article 15 of the International Treaty on PGRFA? Others have…
And as for that IBPGR-funded collecting for Corchorus in Kenya that I could find no evidence of before, that must have been because I was searching for it incorrectly. My mole at the Collecting Missions Files Repository was able to identify it pretty quickly. 1 For the record, the missions took place in 1987-1988, under the leadership of I.R Denton of the International Jute Organization. And the material is still being used, as searching for that name in Google Scholar can tell you. But here’s how the source of material from those expeditions is being described in a fairly recent paper:
All the materials were obtained through the courtesy of the Director, Central Research Institute for Jute and Allied Fibers, Barrackpore, India, from the IJO world collection.
So people still recognize a “global jute collection,” but is it now located at the Central Research Institute for Jute and Allied Fibers, Barrackpore, India? Time for some further sleuthing, I guess.
Nibbles: Drought tolerance, Cassava pests, Sorghum beer, Frankincense, Permaculture in Asia, RDA
- “…drought-tolerant species are not necessarily following the general “stress-tolerator” syndrome.” Meaning?
- More on that cassava-problems-will-get-worse-with-climate-change thing from CIAT.
- More on that beer-will-save-East-African-agriculture-from-drought thing.
- Two of the Wise Men to rescue “poverty-stricken Ethiopian communities.”
- F. H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan: The backstory. Via.
- Presenting South Korea’s genebank.
Brainfood: Community forestry, Chinese Paleolithic, Peanut wild relatives, Pepper taxonomy, Fruit tree domestication, Allelopathy, Olive evaluation
- Back to basics: Considerations in evaluating the outcomes of community forestry. You don’t need fancy indicators.
- Plant exploitation of the last foragers at Shizitan in the Middle Yellow River Valley China: Evidence from grinding stones. Remains of starch and patterns of wear on grinding stones show that Paleolithic people in China used a lot of plants, in a lot of ways.
- Phenotypic diversity and identification of wild Arachis accessions with useful agronomic and nutritional traits. Our friends at ICRISAT identify the top 20 wild peanut accessions.
- Taxonomy and genetic diversity of domesticated Capsicum species in the Andean region. AFLPs and SSRs clarify some taxonomic issues, but show high diversity not just in Bolivia, the putative centre of origin. No top 20 though.
- From forest to field: Perennial fruit crop domestication. They’re like annuals in some respects, different in others. Perhaps most interestingly, their domestication bottleneck wasn’t so much of one.
- Allelopathic potential of Triticum spp., Secale spp. and Triticosecale spp. and use of chromosome substitutions and translocations to improve weed suppression ability in winter wheat. Low in wheat, but high in some rye accessions, and transferrable.
- Genotyping and evaluation of local olive varieties of a climatically disfavoured region through molecular, morphological and oil quality parameters. Eight minor varieties could be less so.
Rupestrine Roman agrobiodiversity
Capparis on this occasion. But I’ve also seen figs, pomegranate and assorted crop wild relatives growing on walls. Time for a serious survey?