It is 16.21 hrs here in Rome, and there’s no sign of any activity over at the World Bank’s discussion. We know they had questions, and not just from us. They must have answers, surely. I can barely wait to get home and refresh my browser, again.
Get the straight dope from the horse’s mouth
We’ve been apprised, almost certainly by some sort of automated process, ((And I quote: “I saw your blog entry on agriculture, and I thought you might be interested either in highlighting this on your blog, or submitting a question yourself.”)) that the author of the World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, which focused on agriculture, will take your questions in a live, thrusting, very web 2.0 effort later today. You can submit questions here. We have.
Canadian fish in trouble
Two separate pieces in EurekAlert in the past couple of days point to something being decidedly rotten in the state of Canadian fisheries. First, evidence that parasitic sea lice from salmon farms are spreading to nearby wild populations and may wipe them out within a few years. ((Can anyone think of a similar thing happening with a crop and its wild relatives? I can’t.)) And the historic American eel fishery is also in trouble, possibly as a result of pollution in Lake Ontario. Bad luck, or something more?
Ethiopian farmers beating pulses
Reuters has a video (about 7 minutes long, and you’ll need a fast connection) about farmers in Ethiopia turning to beans and other pulses as a replacement earner for coffee, which has been buffeted by global production shifts. The hero of the story is Hailu Worku, who does indeed seem to be a pretty impressive farmer. But he has 20 hectares. How typical is that of the “smallholder” farmers that a government spokesman says are the ones growing all those beans for export? And I wasn’t clear from the video whether the farmers are growing beans as part of a rotation with their grain crops. The story mentions an Italian company that is buying up lots of beans for export and a farmer cooperative, which returns 70% of profits to the farmers. Hailu Worke sells to both; now that’s diversity as insurance.
A mighty wind
My recent post about lighting strikes in a coconut genebank was picked up by the excellent Coconut Google Group and generated some interesting responses. In particular, there’s a comment from Charles Clement of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil recounting how a high-velocity wind blast — an Amazonian wind storm — took out a large chunk of his peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) genebank. Ex situ conservation in field genebanks can be a risky business indeed. The solutions are clear: more replications within collections, cleverly distributed in space; safety duplication of the entire collection somewhere else entirely (in vitro or as seeds as appropriate); and complementary conservation in situ. But that all costs money. I would say that most food crop accessions maintained in field genebanks around the world are unique. Take coconut. The Coconut Genetic Resources Database records 1416 accessions from 28 genebanks in 23 countries. More than 600 of them are represented by a single accession.