The 13th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) of the Convention on Biological Diversity has been meeting all week here in the FAO building in Rome. I only mention it because the agenda includes discussion of a review of implementation of the CBD’s programme of work on agricultural biodiversity. You can read about that discussion and various side events at UKabc and IISD. If you’re taking part and would like to share your thoughts and impressions, let us know. I did sit in on one session as an observer, but really, I have no idea what was going on.
Genebanks galore
Great to start the day with genebank stories. First, from Africa, two separate articles about the Ugandan genebank, one focusing on what’s going in and the other what’s coming out. And then, from India, a heart-warming story about saving the jackfruit.
Talking about health and biodiversity
The 2nd International Conference on Health and Biodiversity will kick off next week in sunny Galway, Ireland. As ever, if you’re going to be there, and would like to tell the world about it, you’re more than welcome to use these pages to do so. Meanwhile, in Maccarese, Bioversity International has a space on its website for discussion on how biodiversity can be used to fight hunger and malnutrition: have your say!
Why organic tomatoes are good for you
I’ve been meaning to blog this for almost a month. R. Ford Denison (a name to reckon with) blogged about some of his own research that summarizes 10 years of research into the flavonoid content of tomatoes grown conventionally and organically. Bottom line is that the organic tomatoes contained almost double the flavonoids of conventionals. I’m not going to go into whether that’s a good thing or not. Instead, I’ll stress the point that Denison himself makes, about Darwinian agriculture.
Why do the organic tomatoes contain more flavonoids? Maybe because flavonoids play a part in combatting herbivory. And they are often produced in response to pest attacks, rather than all the time. So one reason that organic tomatoes contain more of these compounds — which are believed to be good for human health — is precisely because on an organic farm there are a few pests that attack the plants. No pests, no need for defense, no benefits for human health.
This is just one aspect of what Denison calls Darwinian agriculture, a fascinating approach to the whole question of just what is being selected. There is, as someone else wrote, grandeur in this view of life …
Feral rape: seedbank to blame
People do worry about the “escape” of agricultural plants into the pristine wilderness that surrounds farmers fields. In England, smears of bright yellow follow the roads that harvesters and trucks have taken with their loads of mustard and rape seeds. The big question seems to be whether such escapees can persist in the wild. Now, in Ecological Modelling, an “exhaustive 4-year survey” in France looked at the origin of feral crops. Seed immigration from fields and from transport are important, but the single most important factor was found to be the seedbank; the number of seeds in the soil at any given time. ((PIVARD, S. (2008). Characterizing the presence of oilseed rape feral populations on field margins using machine learning. Ecological Modelling, 212;(1-2), 147-154. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.10.012))
Many cultivated species, such as oilseed rape, sunflower, wheat or sorghum can escape from crops, and colonize field margins as feral populations. The general processes leading to the escape and persistence of cultivated species on field margins are still poorly investigated. An exhaustive 4-year survey was conducted in the centre of France at a landscape level to study the origin of feral oilseed rape populations. We present here results obtained with machine learning methods, which are increasingly popular techniques for analysing large ecological datasets. As expected, the dynamics of feral populations relies on large seed immigration from fields and transport. However, the seed bank was shown to be the keystone of their persistence rather than local recruitment.
Which is good to know. But of course the real reason to blog this post is to note the unfortunate paper title, involving as it does “feral rape,” and to include a link to one of my favourite non-agrobiodiversity sources, Language Log, which just happens to be dealing with some of the Brassicaceae and which has this to say:
[Further side note: rape [rep] as the name for these greens in English has an understandably unhappy history. Even rapeseed oil, for the cooking oil made from the seeds of the rape plant, is edgy — which is why we now have canola oil, made from a variety of rapeseed originally developed in Canada.]
Of course, feral canola carries no google-juice whatsoever.