And, concidentally or not, a conference on Charcoal and Communities in Africa has just ended in Maputo. There’s been some press coverage, but I can’t find any recommendations etc. online yet.
Energy special
Hot on the heels of our concerns about carbon sequestration, biofuels, biochar, EGS and all that malarkey, The Economist has a special issue this week on Alternative Energy. 1 And what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Let a thousand flowers bloom.
UG99: The Phantom Menace?
Very good news from the United States Department of Agriculture. Breeders are about to release the first wheat lines that incorporate several genes for resistance to UG99, the new race of rust fungus that threatens wheat worldwide. One line will be available to growers on the east coast of the US. All will be available to breeders worldwide to develop new varieties adapted to local conditions.
Part of the effort leading to the new wheats has been a screening of more than 5000 accessions from several genebanks. One outcome of this massive evaluation exercise has been the discovery that UG99 had overcome many more resistance genes than original estimates. That’s why it has been important to pyramid several resistance genes into the new varieties. Just where those resistance genes came from I don’t know. But the USDA does say that the breeders “also will develop new sources of genetic resistance to rusts from three wild relatives of wheat”.
Good luck to them. Certainly the wheat farmers of Iran, 2 Pakistan, Afghanistan and northern India — the current front in the fight against UG99 — need all the help they can get. But a tiny part of me really rather hopes that the new varieties are not in fact a success.
The world badly needs another demonstration of the power of pests and diseases to destroy food supplies and the importance of agricultural biodiversity to protect us from them. Southern corn blight is the poster child for the value of diversity.
That outbreak more or less created the modern move to conserve crop diversity in genebanks, a move that has lost its impetus as the world forgets that food security requires the ready availability of lots and lots of agricultural biodiversity.
So while I am truly glad that breeders are making progress against UG99, I’d also like to see UG99 make real inroads into the developed world’s wheat crops, just as a reminder, lest they forget. 3
Livestock policies come alive
Our friends at Wrenmedia, who are responsible, among other things, for New Agriculturalist, have recently branched out into moving pictures. A series of presentations accompany an FAO project on pro-poor livestock policy and institutional change. They’re up on Youtube; here’s the one on Burkina Faso:
Maybe they’ll be tempted to enter something in The Competition?
Land of silk and honey
We’ve had another enquiry about silk-making in Kenya, which is one of our most commented-on stories, so I was prompted to go and look for more information. I hadn’t really taken in before that the reason the projects promote bees and silkworms together is that (some?) African silk moths eat the leaves of Acacias, whose flowers are a source of nectar for bees. Win-win.
Anyway, back to the search for further information. There really isn’t that much. Luigi had already pointed to UNDP’s project, which doesn’t look as if it has changed much since then. New Agriculturalist had an article on sericulture a little more than a year ago, Kambogo Women’s Group is raising silkworms and feeding them on mulberry leaves, somewhat different from the wild silkworms feeding on acacia that are the focus of UNDP and IFAD efforts in Mwingi District. I also turned up some rough TV news footage here; it is unedited and pretty blurry, but it gives a rough idea of some of the things being done.
IFAD’s funding seems to have ended in 2004. People in Kenya clearly want to know more. So why isn’t more information available? And just what is the current state of the silk business in Kenya?
One of our readers must know more. Share, please.