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Mo’ better beans

Iowa State University has been awarded $450,000 by the US Agency for International Development to improve beans in Rwanda. The University’s Center for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods will work with local partners to see whether improving yields will result in beans that are more nutritious or more marketable or — Jackpot! — both. Nice idea, and if it succeeds a valuable contribution to fighting hunger and poverty in the region. As ever with this sort of project, however, one wonders whether specific steps will be taken to preserve the existing bean biodiversity that improved varieties will almost certainly displace.

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Agriculture and learning

Even if seeds survive climate change and mass extinction in a bomb-proof vault, will anyone remember how to cultivate them?

That, for me, is the money question in an admittedly parochial article from a blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Should a Liberal Education Include an Agricultural Education? wonders whether American colleges should be teaching liberal arts students where food comes from, and makes several interesting points along the way. Like, for example, the fact that one can view just about any subject through an agricultural lens. But why restrict it to Liberal Arts students? (A term, incidentally, that I confess I have never fully understood.) Wouldn’t it be good, and useful, for all students to know a little bit more about the food supply and all its ramifications?

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Tibet’s seeds must be stored as climate changes

At the risk of offending the nabobs at Macmillan Publishing, I am going to post this letter to Nature in its entirety, because Nature requires one to pay to read it online, and the subject is too important for that. ((And thanks to Hannes Dempewolf for the tip.))

Sir
The Tibet–Qinghai plateau is an area where climate change may have huge effects as glaciers retreat, leading to large decreases in water supply in the mega-rivers of India, southeast Asia and China by the middle of the century. For the 6,000 or more species of higher plants, including the widely admired Himalayan alpines, the effects will be even more severe as vegetation zones move upwards by several hundred metres. The movement of regions suitable for growth will be followed, not accompanied, by the vegetation suited to them, increasing the risk of extinctions.

In Tibet, few of the practices adopted in many other countries are in place. Although there are 38 nature reserves, covering a third of the country, there are no botanical gardens. The preservation of seeds of Tibetan plants is virtually non-existent. The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew in the United Kingdom stores seed from only three Tibetan species, and China’s largest seed bank, the Southwest China Germplasm Bank of Wild Species in the Kunming Institute of Botany, has none.

We and researchers at other institutions are addressing this gap. We hope we’ll be in time.

W. John Cram, China–UK HUST–RRes Genetic Engineering and Genomics Joint Laboratory, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074
Yang Zhong, School of Life Sciences and Center for Evolutionary Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Tashi Tersing, Institute of Biodiversity Science and Geobiology, Tibet University, Lhasa 850000, China
Jie Cai, Millennium Seed Bank Project, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Wakehurst Place, Ardingly, West Sussex RH17 6TN, UK

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Nothing to eat

19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century is a slide show that sets out a jaw-dropping agenda to study the near future. The slide are wonderful, so is the concept. One can but hope that the results will be too. Just one little niggle: nowhere among the 14 “subjects of exploration” does the word “food” appear. Health, yes. Nutrition, no. Water sources, yes. Agriculture, no. Maybe sustenance will find its way into all the explorations, but somehow I doubt it. ((Cross-posted from my other place.))