ABS deconstructed

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has an on-line decision-making tool to help you work your way through Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) arrangements ((Thanks to Danny for the find.)):

Under the Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Fair and Equitable Sharing of the Benefits Arising out of their Utilization, of the Convention on Biological Diversity, companies commit to sharing benefits of the use of genetic resources with host countries. Through its SECO funded Access and Benefit Sharing project, IISD has led the development of the “Access and Benefit Sharing Management Tool”– a voluntary tool for implementing the Bonn Guidelines.

It seems quite thorough. For example, it includes discussion of how the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) fits into the larger ABS picture.

Kathryn over at Blogging Biodiversity suggests that treating biodiversity like a string of sausages — one set of rules for agrobiodiversity, another for medicinal plants, a third for microbes perhaps, etc. — may not be such a good idea. She recognizes that there are very good reasons why agricultural biodiversity should be treated in a different way to medicinal plants, for example, but is worried about this being the beginning of a nasty slippery slope. But the ITPGRFA is international law, whatever its faults, and the wider biodiversity ABS community is slowly learning to live with it.

Uses for giant earthworms

A comment on the threat to the Banaue rice terraces prompted me to go Googling, and it seems the story has legs. Unlike the giant earthworms, which may or may not be an all-female species related to a worm called Polypheretima elongata. SciDev.net reports on the efforts of an Indian scientist, Ravindra Joshi, to help the villagers to get rid of the giant earthworms and the rats ((There’s a less informative and slightly garbled version in The Daily Telegraph.)).

To tackle the earthworms, Joshi’s team taught the Ifugao a method of ‘worm farming’ that is popular with small-scale entrepreneurs in the lowlands. The Ifugao collect the worms and rear them in a mixture of soil and old newspapers. They then harvest the worms and process them into feeds used by fish farmers.

Elsewhere in the Philippines people eat worm sausages and burgers, but the Ifugao people who built Banaue have a taboo against soil dwelling creatures. There wasn’t such a taboo against eating rats, so Joshi worked with the locals to develop a community system of rice traps that uses a particularly aromatic rice planted early as a trap crop to lure the rats to their death.

There’s another rodent, though, that eats the giant earthworms. So the villagers have learned to distinguish Rattus tanezumi from Chrotomys whiteheadi, eating the former but releasing the latter to eat the giant earthworms.

Big coffee study on the Big Island

The Garden Island News reports on a US$120,000 comprehensive study of coffee agroforestry that has just begun. The point seems to be to quantify the costs and benefits of growing coffee under an upper story of diverse forest trees. The article says that Pacific islanders traditionally grew crops in agroforestry systems, and that many are returning to similar practices. Benefits range from cooler air to fewer pests and diseases to greater resilience, all of which will be investigated.

The study will look at 12 existing shade-grown coffee orchards and compare them with five open-grown coffee orchards based on five key indicators: soil organic matter, major insect pests, yield and bean quality, production costs and market values, and environmental conditions such as shade levels, tree density and plant species present.

Animal diseases reviewed

Thanks to Danny Hunter for pointing to two recent posts at CABI’s blog, one on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease to you and me), the other on bluetongue disease. BSE seems to be running its course and to be more or less under control, even though many mysteries still surround it. Bluetongue, however, is altogether more menacing, because it seems to have reached Britain at least partly as a result of climate change, which has allowed the midges that spread the virus to expand their range. This could be the start of something big. I don’t believe there is any resistance associated with different breeds of cattle, but I could be wrong.

Agrobiodiversity in China

Back now from Kunming and Beijing, I discover that there is a rather massive Sino-German collaboration on Sustainable Management of Agrobiodiversity. It apparently runs from June 2005 to May 2009, and is certainly casting its net wide in both Hunan and the island province of Hainan. The project web site is rather neat, although I personally found the content just a little confusing. It is hard to get a sense of timing, and the use of acronyms is downright confusing. I clicked on PVP Training in Hunan Province Successfully Held fully expecting it to be about plant variety protection, only to discover it was about participatory village planning. Still, that’s minor. There’s plenty to explore and I’m sure the project will have an impact. Now, if only I can persuade the project to establish an RSS feed and to change the name of one of the organisations the web site links to, I’ll be even happier.

p.s. Just to pull all my recent posts from China together (just in case someone somewhere is Googling “china agrobiodiversity”) here they are: