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Down memory lane

I suppose if you blog long enough eventually you’ll end up re-visiting old stories. That happened quite a lot today.

First, there was a post I wrote a few months back about how mesquite — a useful source of food and other products in some places — is proving a nuisance in northern Kenya. Well, according to a story out today in the East African Standard, the government has been taken to court over the introduction of the plant, but is shifting the blame to FAO.

Then, you may recall a couple of posts about Brazil nuts and more generally nuts in Brazil. Today I ran across a paper ((Karen A. Kainer, Lucia H.O. Wadt and Christina L. Staudhammer. Explaining variation in Brazil nut fruit production. Forest Ecology and Management, 2007.)) which followed fruit production in 140 Brazil nut trees over 5 years. ((Clicking where it says map below this post will take you to where the Brazilian researchers work: Rio Branco, Acre)) What struck me was that there was significant variation in fruit production from year to year for individual trees, but that some trees are consistently high producers. I don’t know if there’s a Brazil nut improvement programme, but if there is it should definitely know about those! There are also management practices that are likely to increase production, such as cutting lianas and adding P.

Third, an editorial and article in Nature about the use of systems biology ((“The study of the interactions between proteins, genes, metabolites and components of cells or organisms”)) to evaluate traditional Chinese medicines reminded me that I’d written on that subject too. What is fascinating about Chinese traditional medicine is that it is based on diversity: it doesn’t deal in single chemicals taken singly, but rather in often incredibly complex combinations of a myriad plant and other products. A particular species will often play quite different roles in different formulae aimed at different symptoms.

Finally, I mentioned about a month back a piece of work ((Eric Giraud et al. Legume Symbioses: Absence of Nod Genes in Photosynthetic Bradyrhizobia. Science, 2007)) on an often overlooked but very important subset of agricultural biodiversity — microsymbionts. A longish article yesterday in EurekaAlert on the same work (I don’t know why the delay) made me realize I had been excessively cursory at the time of my original post. The researchers have identified a totally new genetic mechanism controlling the way nodulation happens, which opens up the possibility of interesting agricultural applications.

One of the things this little flurry of retrospection has done is alert me to the fact that some of the links in older posts may now be broken, for example because after a certain period of time the piece gets put into an archive behind a paywall. Not sure what we can do about that, though.

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A policy for pastoralism in Africa?

The African Union apparently launched a Pan-African Pastoral Policy Initiative at a conference at Isiolo in northern Kenya last week. There’s a little bit about the event on the website of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Pastoralist Communication Initiative (one of the organizers), but not much. An article summarizing some of the results was released a few days ago by the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks and got picked up by various agencies. But that’s all I’ve been able to find. Which is a pity, because listen to what the IRIN article says:

The key issues that emerged from the discussions included: governance; land; education; markets and financial services; conflicts; and poverty risk and vulnerability. Another point was the ‘biological dimension’ – feed resources and animal genetic resources.

There’s nothing about biodiversity in the African Union pamphlet introducing the policy initiative, but it sounds as though that may have been rectified during the meeting itself.

The IRIN article is very good, full of pithy quotes and interesting information, like this:

A concept note prepared by the AU and OCHA-PCI on the continental policy framework quotes UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2005 figures, which indicate that the continent has 235 million cattle, 472 million goats, 21 million pigs and 1.3 billion poultry, all valued at US$65 billion.

I did look for this concept note but sadly couldn’t find it online.

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Weaver ants protect mango and cashew crops

Farmers in Benin harvest fruit of far higher quality if they allow weaver ants (Oecophylla longinoda) to infest their mango (Mangifera indica) trees. Scientists at the CGIAR’s Inland Valley Consortium noticed that fruit-fly damage was lower in trees where weaver ants were abundant. So they arranged to exclude ants from trees on six plantations. The results were very encouraging. ((Paul Van Mele; Jean-François Vayssières; Esther Van Tellingen; Jan Vrolijks. Effects of an African Weaver Ant, Oecophylla longinoda, in Controlling Mango Fruit Flies (Diptera: Tephritidae) in Benin. Journal of Economic Entomology 2007, vol. 100, no. 3, pp. 695 – 701.)) Farmers who tolerated the ants can manage without pesticides and are able to sell their mangoes into the lucrative European organic market. The scientists reckon it takes just a day to teach farmers about the benefits of weaver ants, and are planning to take their ideas to East Africa and Asia.

There is just one downside. The ants bite. But that can be avoided by harvesting the fruit with poles instead of by climbing the trees. ((There are further write-ups at Scidev.net and The Economist.))

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Seed Regulation: How much is enough?

Earlier this year we posted about how EU Regulations destroy agricultural biodiversity and proposed rules to allow the marketing of European traditional varieties. Eliseu Bettencourt, a colleague with a close interest, said then that he didn’t have enough time to intervene in the discussion. Now, he says, he has a chance. Which would be kind of dull except that he’s seen the very latest drafts of the documents …

The post of 19th February 2007 refers to the “Draft Commission Directive establishing the specific conditions under which seed and propagating material of agricultural and vegetable species may be marketed in relation to the conservation in situ and the sustainable use of plant genetic resources through growing and marketing”, supposedly due to come into force on 1st April 2007. The Directive did indeed materialize as the writer of the post so rightly guessed then, though he even refrained from the obvious joke.

I guess the writer was referring to the draft document of May 2006, which bore that title. According to the drafts I have had access to later, in February 2007, that document was sub-divided intro three different documents, respectively: Continue reading “Seed Regulation: How much is enough?”