Banana researchers are meeting in Mombasa, and conservationists of all stripes in Barcelona. Both are receiving a lot of press. Africa Science News Service, for example, has a piece on the banana conference. And the BBC has a daily diary on the World Conservation Congress, no less. If you’re at either meeting, and would like to share your impressions with us, let us know.
Vavilov blogs up a storm in the Pamirs
Disappearing wild potatoes mined for drought tolerance
An article in National Geographic looks at possible changes in the climate of the Andes, how they will affect potatoes, and what breeders are doing about it. The wild relatives are very much to the fore:
“The crosses we are developing between wild, drought-tolerant varieties and modern potatoes now are for the future,” said Meredith Bonierbale, senior potato breeder at the International Potato Center in Lima.
The article also quotes our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis, ((Andy works for CIAT and Bioversity in Cali, Colombia.)) who recently collaborated with others on a paper which concluded that some of those very same wild relatives are themselves threatened:
“Even if we halt habitat loss, in the next 50 years, climate change could undo all of the conservation that we already have,” said Jarvis.
Nibbles: Hops, Green Revolution, Leeks, Hemp, Ethical eating, Cuba, Farmers’ markets
- Brewers vertically integrate themselves. Like Snoopy Miller.
- They met, we ate.
- Roman garden recreated in Wales, complete with leeks.
- “There are around 45,000 different uses for hemp.”
- Drawing the ecotarian line.
- Cuban urban agriculture sprouts anew after Ike.
- List of farmers markets in the US. Luigi asks: where’s the GoogleMaps mashup?
Harlan II, day 4
From a very tired and emotional Robert Hijmans. Previously….
No domestication without relaxation. Today was excursion day at the Harlan II symposium. All to the Napa wineries you’d think, but no, there were not enough registrants for that. ((Editor’s note: Excuse me?)) But there was a tour of the Charles Rick Tomato Genebank and a “Native Biodiversity and Plant/Pollinator Interactions” tour, visiting field sites used by Claire Kremen’s group. But I had my own program. Before I get to that, which I will do in a separate post, allow me to make to parting comment on the Harlan II symposium.
On day 1, I mentioned that molecular biology rules. The increased understanding of the relatedness of populations of different crop taxa and their wild relatives is having a tremendous effect on our understanding of domestication and dispersal of agrobiodiversity. The flurry of recent papers on this subject has probably not escaped the attention of readers of this blog.
Be that as may, I should also have mentioned the explosion of archaeological data and analysis. Compared to 10 years ago, there are now many more late Pleistocene to early Holocene settlements that have been analyzed. This is providing a much more refined insight into early agriculture and domestication than was previously possible.
I do not know why there has been such an increase, all of a sudden. More people and money thrown at it, no doubt, but why now? At the same time, and perhaps not unrelated, there appears to have been an important increase in the sophistication of the methods used to study agricultural origins. Extracting charred starch particles from pot fragments or mortars. Determining minor differences in grain sizes to classify them as one type or the other. Tallies of bone sizes to determine whether the animals were hunted or farmed. And then there is the analysis of ancient DNA. And so forth. Not much Indiana Jones in it, but it is quite safe and more intellectually rewarding.
Most insights about agricultural origins still come from the Levant. While other areas are much less explored, they are also moving along. For many places and periods, we now have a good idea about what plants and animals were eaten. That is why we now know that there was a long transition from cultivation to domestication. This is why Dorian Fuller was able to show us graphs with changes in crop characteristics over time for multiple crops (wheat, barley, rice).
The origins of agriculture and the domestication process that took place about 10,000 yrs ago are fascinating and fundamental to the understanding of the history of humans. But domestication has never stopped, and will not stop, despite EU regulations. There are many other stories, from other regions, from other (not cereal) crops that have been much less explored.
Jared Diamond is convinced that no more crops or animals of major importance will be domesticated. He says that crop and animal domestication happened where there were species predisposed to be domesticated. We found them millennia ago. That is why agriculture originated where it did, and this is one of the reasons why some places are richer than others.
I wonder whether we can be more imaginative about what domestication could do to some wild plant or animal. We now know what it takes and can engage it what Melinda Zeder calls “directed domestication”. Perhaps something for an X-Prize. A hundred million dollars for anyone who can develop a crop that is now insignificant (say less than 10,000 ha) to an area of at least 10 million ha. I agree that it is hard to image that this will happen with staple food crops, but it is bound to happen with an energy crop.