Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 10, 2008September 9, 2008

Exploring a Belgian genebank

I’m jealous of Luigi’s ability to work and play almost simultaneously. ¹ He visits a market in Sarajevo and within hours his words and pictures are gracing this page. I visit a genebank in Belgium and it is more than a fortnight before I manage to pull anything together. But no more whining. On with the show.

I was privileged to get a guided tour of the International Transit Centre in Leuven, home of Bioversity’s International Musa collection, which is supported in part by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. There are good reasons for it to be in Belgium, but it is still a glorious sight to see banana plants scraping the roof of a 5-metre tall greenhouse.

That’s Rony Swennen in the picture, doing his tour guide schtick in the main greenhouse. He runs the show. One of the things that’s hard to understand, coming from a purely cultivated view of the banana, is the role that some species play in the wild. They can be really opportunistic colonisers.

Just in front of Rony was a specimen of Musa velutina, with pinky-red skinned fruit. And beneath it, a veritable carpet of seedlings. M. velutina is a pioneer species that often spreads rapidly into newly cleared areas and can choke riverbanks and the like.

It isn’t all bananas in the greenhouse. There is also Taro, and a few other tropical crops that are normally propagated vegetatively. Leuven has been named a Global Centre of Excellence in Cryopreservation. The researchers have perfected the protocols for preserving banana cells in liquid nitrogen, and now they tweak them for many other crops and train scientists from other countries to do the delicate work of cryopreservation.

Cryopreservation has many benefits over keeping plants in tissue-culture, the standard genebank technique for clonal crops. It’s cheap and efficient, once the capital costs are accounted for. But both methods can obscure problems. Frozen material, just like stuff in tissue culture, occasionally suffers a mutation in its DNA. So from time to time samples are grown out to check that they haven’t changed dramatically. The plant on the left has, and the batch from which it came will be discarded. The rate of such off-types is about 7%. That’s low. But the genebank has multiple samples of each accession, to be sure, to be sure.

So there you have it. A quick romp through what I did on my recent travels. More later.

September 10, 2008

Happy 2001

I’m OK with the idea of there being a diversity of calendars around the world. New Year, after all, should fall at some reasonably meaningful time, like right after the winter solstice, or around one of the equinoxes. Or, as in Ethiopia, around the end of the main rains.

Today.

To celebrate, the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity Conservation has a long article celebrating and explaining Enkukatash. That word means Gift of Jewels. The article explains a few of them.

September 9, 2008September 9, 2008

Exploring a Sarajevo market

I spent an interesting hour or so with Elcio exploring an open-air fruit and vegetable market in central Sarajevo last week. I think it is the very same market which was tragically attacked during the war with much loss of life. No sign of that now, thankfully, except for a memorial to the victims.

You can see some pictures of the fruit and vegetable diversity on display on my Flickr page. Here I just want to point out two curiosities. Or at least they were to me. Here’s the first.

This lady is selling necklaces of dried, perhaps immature but certainly small, okra fruits, called bamia in Bosnian (and indeed in Arabic for that matter). They are soaked in water and vinegar for a few minutes, then added to fried onions and meat to make a local stew. Or that’s what a lady buying some told us. I bought some and will try it. I’d never heard of okra being used in this dried form.

The second thing that came as a surprise to me was this fruit. Sorry I don’t have a decent picture of it being sold in the market.

Clearly some kind of Physalis, perhaps P. alkekengi? It was being sold a few fruits at a time, so probably for medicinal purposes (LATER: or as ornaments?) rather than food. I couldn’t communicate with the lady selling it, the only one in the market. Any ideas?

September 8, 2008September 12, 2008

Climate change risk hotspots mapped

A SciDevNet piece on the report “Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots” says that

The report, commissioned by CARE International and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), identifies Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and Pakistan as countries particularly vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.

But actually, looking at the map on page 26 from an agrobiodiversity conservation point of view, the countries I’d target — for germplasm collecting, for example — are Mozambique, Madagascar and Vietnam. The authors looked at flood, cyclone and drought risk. These countries are in for all three.

LATER: At least Cuba doesn’t seem to be at much increased threat, which is just as well!

September 8, 2008

An approach to extension in Africa

Sharron responded to my thoughts on extension in Africa with this remark:

Sounds like the kind of work Peace Corps volunteers have been doing for decades.

Not quite. Peace Corp volunteers do wonderful work, but in essence they parachute in and often, though by no means always, apply solutions that are not necessarily entirely appropriate to the situation in which they find themselves. What is needed is local people, locally trained, but exposed to a world of experience among similar farmers facing similar obstacles. Agreed, we don’t yet know how to fund this sustainably, or exactly how to establish the e-aspect of it. But those details could be worked out, with a will.

Meantime, here’s a little video interview with Getachew Tibuket, whose Farmer Field Schools have trained something like 25,000 farmers in Ethiopia. I’ve no idea what they are trained to do, but it sounds like a useful approach.

Other examples welcome.