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Funding for international agricultural research

A long report in the New York Times details the precipitous decline in funds for international agricultural research. Money quote:

Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations roughly in half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion. The United States cut its support for agriculture in poor countries to $624 million from $2.3 billion in that period.

The story revolves around the brown plant hopper, a devastating pest of rice. Back in the 1980s, the International Rice Research Institute searched for, and found, resistance to the insect, which it bred into high-yielding varieties that were the basis of the Green Revolution. The hopper, of course, took this in its stride and evolved to defeat the resistance gene. It can now also withstand 100 times the dose of insecticide that used to kill it. IRRI says they have new sources of resistance, but cannot afford to breed those into new varieties.

One puzzle: the report says there are 14 centres supported by the CGIAR. There are 15. Or does the NYT know something we don’t?

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Dietary diversity improves nutrition

An absolutely fascinating paper from FANTA (Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance) reports the outcome of a study of Dietary Diversity as a Measure of Women’s Diet Quality in Resource-Poor Areas: Results from Rural Bangladesh Site. I’ve only read the Executive Summary, I confess, but the take-home messages are clear.

Our results from rural Bangladesh indicate that micronutrient intakes were very inadequate indeed. We note that intakes were inadequate for all micronutrients, not just those that are the usual focus of public health interventions (iron/folate during pregnancy, vitamin A, and iodine). The major deficits identified here will not be alleviated by programs narrowly focused on one or several micronutrients.

How then can those deficits be alleviated?

The study developed a range of indicators of dietary diversity and dietary quality, based on women’s recollections of what they had eaten during the previous 24 hours and assessing how well that delivered each of 11 micronutrients. Even for women who were getting far less than the recommended amounts, those who ate a more diverse diet nevertheless got more micronutrients, and this was independent of the total amount of food they ate.

Although other food groups were eaten in small quantities, they provided substantial proportions of the folate, vitamin A, vitamin C, and calcium in the diet, and all of the vitamin B12 (because this last is found only in animal-source foods). The most nutritionally important of these other food groups, in roughly descending order of importance in the diet, were dark green leafy vegetables; fish; nuts and seeds; dairy; “other” vegetables; vitamin C-rich vegetables; eggs; and vitamin C-rich fruits.

These analyses showed that the increases in nutrient intakes and adequacy that accompany increases in diversity result both from increased total intakes (reflected in energy intakes) and from increases in the nutrient density of the diet.

Dark green leafy vegetables, fish, nuts and seeds; these are not terribly difficult things to grow and make available at a very local level. The health benefits are immense, and because of the effects of maternal nutrition on the growth and development of their children would be felt for years. But how many governments, how many aid agencies and charities, how many projects, are actually pushing dietary diversity as a solution to malnutrition?

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Fancy that! Rice plantings up, poppies down

FAO announced a couple of days ago that “Rice production in Asia, Africa and Latin America is forecast to reach a new record level in 2008”. I’m astounded. Imagine that. Farmers respond to higher prices by planting more. And in other press-stopping news, the Corriere della Sera said yesterday that farmers in Afghanistan are abandoning fusty old opium poppies for wheat, lured by a tripling of wheat prices. Right, that’s going to continue.

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Reindeer domestication

From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.

Reindeer have been domesticated by denizens of the Northern hemisphere for some time – but exactly for how long and  whether domestication occurred at different sites or only once has been the matter of some debate. Estimates of how long ago domestication might have happened have ranged from as long as 20,000 years ago to as little as 3000. Part of the problems stems from the lack of archaeological records that could pinpoint  a more exact time frame. The evidence for the shorter period relies mostly on ethnographic observation, such as the development of certain implements (for example saddles) that early reindeer herders developed apparently after contact with other people of the central Asian steppes.

But did domestication  happen more than once? A recent paper by a group of researchers from Oslo sheds some light on this question.  After analysis of a number of DNA markers they conclude that the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia domesticated reindeer independently from indigenous people in what is now Russia.  Moreover the evidence points to the existence of three distinct gene pools suggesting that domestication even within Russia may have occurred more than once.

And there  is another interesting observation: comparisons with gene markers from wild reindeer suggests that introgression of “wild” genes into domestic reindeer appears to have happened quite frequently through the ages,  but that only some of the  wild populations have made genetic contributions suggesting perhaps different propensities for domestication among animals of various wild herds.

Unfortunately there is increasing concern about the future of reindeer agriculture. The Sami herders, who live in Scandinavia, Finland and parts of Russia, are beginning to feel the effects of global climate changes. The rapid warming trend that seems to occur in the Northern hemisphere interferes not only with foraging but also with the ability to move animals across what used to be solid ice. And many Sami now fear not only the loss of their livelihood, but also the disappearance of a substantial part of the culture, which has always been intricately linked to reindeer. Â