The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) invests £78m (€80m) in plant and crop research at universities and institutes across the UK, sometimes in the form of international partnerships. They have a pamphlet out called The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests, highlighting “key BBSRC-supported research into achieving global food security.” There’s a lot on breeding, in particular as a way of adapting to climate change, and a section on “Harnessing natural diversity.” ((Actually that turns out to be mainly about Arabidopsis.)) There are even a couple of — albeit brief — references to the use of wild relatives in wheat breeding. But nothing at all on the conservation side of things. I guess the BBSRC figures that funding the long-term availability of the raw materials of all this breeding it is supporting is someone else’s problem.
A temple to a lost way of life
Did people start farming because of religion? That’s the claim being made by Klaus Schmidt, the excavator of the beautiful, 12,000-year-old, T-shaped megaliths of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. He calls the site “a temple in Eden” and suggests that the hunter-gatherers that congregated to build it in order to venerate the dead with shamanistic rituals then
…found that they couldn’t feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering. So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.
There was a popular, somewhat sensationalist account of the excavations in the Daily Mail a few days ago. And somewhat more measured pieces in the Smithsonian Magazine and Archaeology last year. But the gist is the same:
Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors — people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.
There would certainly have been lots of wild relatives around:
The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat – first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals — such as rye and oats — also started here.
The idea of farming originating to feed the otherwise nomadic people building a temple to the dead may be a little far-fetched, but I suppose weirder hypotheses have been put forward for the origin of agriculture. In any case, it seems to me the biggest mystery is why people buried the whole shebang under tons of soil 8,000 years ago.
IUCN assesses threat to mammals
Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation reminded us today — quoting an IUCN study from last year — that the African Wild Ass (Equus africanus) is critically endangered. Actually the Asiatic Wild Ass is also in trouble. The summary of the findings of the 2008 IUCN Red List of threatened mammals highlights the situation in SE Asia as particularly worrisome. People are clearly going through the data now and pulling out different themes. A few days ago there was an assessment of the state of rabbits, for example. I wonder if we can look forward to an overview of livestock wild relatives?
Nibbles: Community forestry, Fresh water, Salinity, Seed systems, Acacia, Iron, Cambodia
- Community forestry not making enough money in Namibia. Yeah, but who is?
- Southern African freshwater bodies in trouble. Gotta be some worried rice wild relatives out there.
- Salinity increasing in Bangladesh. That can’t be good.
- Let the people have seeds of local varieties!
- Australian takes acacias to Niger, coals to Newcastle.
- Breeding rice for tolerance to high Fe in West Africa.
- “One of the most abundant sources of fish in Asia, the lake feeds a hungry nation.”
Land sharing or sparing?
That is one of the questions addressed by a paper in Journal of Applied Ecology which looks at the ecogeographic distribution of organic farming in the UK. “Land sparing” means excluding land from intensive agriculture to protect biodiversity. “Land sharing” is a contrasting strategy which would make all agricultural land better for biodiversity. The study recommends
…continuing to use intensive agriculture to meet our food production targets, but using organic farms in suitable areas to provide islands of biodiversity, as well as a smaller amount of food.
So the vote is for land sparing. Ok, fair enough. What gets me, though, is that, as usual, it is only the effect of agriculture on the surrounding wild biodiversity that is being considered. What about the biodiversity that is an integral part of the agricultural system itself? Doesn’t agrobiodiversity count for something in all this?