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Kenyan community ranch wins UN award

A community ranch dedicated to wildlife and conservation has won the UN’s Equator Initiative prize of US$30,000. The Shompole Group Ranch offers a five-star eco-tourist experience and has made great efforts to increase wildlife on its 62,000 hectares, spreading the benefits to community members. But does the ranch also grow the food to feed all those wealthy tourists locally? The story does not say, and nor do the many web sites that tout Shompole ranch as a resort. OK, it is a dry area, but there is freshwater in two permanent rivers.

Meanwhile, just across the border in Tanzania, the President of Sacramento State University apparently pulled strings to enable wealthy benefactors to hunt animals — including endangered species — as trophies.

The common thread, of course, is that wildlife has value — dead and alive — and cashing in on that value may be the most important way for local people to benefit directly.

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Private apple genebank

It’s easy enough to get into the habit of thinking that only institutions run genebanks. Things like government research institutes, private seed companies, university departments and maybe NGOs. In fact, of course, private enthusiasts can and do also play an important role in ex situ conservation — of fruit and veg diversity in particular. For example, there’s Gene Yale, of Skokie, near Chicago, who has a passion for collecting apple varieties and planting them in his suburban garden. He’s got over a hundred of them, including the spectacularly ugly but equally tasy Knobbed Russet. Why? Because, as he points out, he’s “nuts.” For agrobiodiversity, clearly. And in a good way. With video goodness.

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US agricultural assistance to the vulnerable

The US Bureau of International Information Programs has been producing “a series of articles on U.S. food aid and agricultural assistance for vulnerable populations around the world.” The fifth is just out, and this is how it starts:

Scientists from the United States and other nations want to create another “green revolution,” particularly in Africa, that would help poor countries better meet their own food needs and the demands of export markets.

Within governmental, university and private-sector partnerships, researchers are working on new agricultural technologies that can help poor countries end food scarcity and malnutrition.

The article then goes on to list various examples of US scientists working with national agricultural research programmes around the world and CGIAR centres to develop such innovations as “improved crop varieties, more effective fertilizers, new livestock vaccines and new food-processing techniques.”

Which is fine. But why not even a passing mention of the National Plant Germplasm System? At over 450,000 accessions, the genebanks of the NPGS are second only to those of the CGIAR in the amount of agrobiodiversity they conserve. That’s a lot of raw materials for innovation.

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AGRA to train plant breeders

AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, has announced buckets of cash for two universities to train plant breeders. Students in Ghana and South Africa will learn about locally important crops. From the press release:

“A PhD student training in Europe might look for valuable DNA sequences in wheat. An African scientist whose country has no wheat production and no DNA labs will not be equipped to face the challenges of developing local food crops when they go home,” said Prof. Eric Danquah, director of WACCI at the University of Ghana, Legon.

Most of the crops important to Africa—such as cassava, sorghum, millet, plantain, and cowpea—the so-called “orphan crops,” are of little importance to researchers and educators in the developed world. As a result, there is a serious shortage of breeders of these crops. For example, there are under a dozen millet breeders in all of Africa. Yet millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on millet as an important part of their diet. Conversely, most of the more than US$35 billion invested by private firms in agricultural research is concentrated in North America and Europe, on a handful of commercially important crops.

I think this is excellent news. I wonder, though, how much these students will learn about the importance of diversity, within and among the crops. AGRA and its sponsors have had a distressing tendency to think in terms of single silver bullets, and that — unlike 120 PhD plant breeders of orphan crops, in not what Africa needs at all.