A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.
Fidel lashes out … again
While he may have been too ill to attend the Mayday parade in Havana, for only the third time since 1959, Cuban leader Fidel Castro has found the strength to pen yet another diatribe against the current craze for turning food into fuel. His reflections on the sugar harvest are fascinating, but I wonder whether he will have any impact on the rest of the world. And what would he have made of the latest advance: a genetically engineered sorghum, modified to yield better in the long growing seasons of Texas and Kansas.
Alphabet soup — with no sustenance
IMoSEB is the International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity. It was dreamed up at a conference in Paris in January 2005, with the blessing of French President Jacques Chirac. It has been meeting, in various forms, ever since, to try and define itself and its role. The latest meeting, a European Consultation, took place in Geneva from 26-28 April 2007. As far as I can tell from a very lengthy report, participants did not discuss agriculture.
African medicinal plants
Two stories appeared today on medicinal plants in South Africa. AllAfrica has an article on the launch of the Medicinal Plant Incubator Project (MPIP) at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in Roodeplaat, although actually I found the keynote address delivered at the opening ceremony much more interesting. What will MPIP do? According to another article:
Gauteng’s traditional healers are to be taught new methods to cultivate plants and harvest them from the wild, in an attempt to ensure that the local medicine chest remains full for future generations.
Meanwhile, EurekAlert describes how “a team of researchers has now examined the effectiveness of 16 plants growing in the country’s Kwa-Zulu Natal region and concluded that eight plant extracts may hold value for treating high blood pressure (hypertension).”
Wikiseedia: what is it?
There’s a long and detailed message from the folks at WorldChanging about something they call SeedPOD. It isn’t clear exactly what this resource will be. A sort of information exchange, but also a network for exchanging seeds and maybe too a platform for sharing experiments and results in more sustainable agriculture. As they describe it:
an imagined toolkit to keep seeds moving, farmers thriving and communities fed in the face of massive environmental change. Perhaps it will trigger some interesting thinking out there: at very least, we hope you find it briefly diverting.
All this seems to be organized through something called the Wikiseedia, but as far as I can see there is no link to this fabulous beast. Go to www.wikiseedia.com, however, and you see a bare bones installation of a wiki (a special kind of web site that anyone can contribute to and edit) that contains no content (yet?) and that has not been changed since 5 March 2007. WorldChanging’s post is dated 27 April.
There’s something happening out there. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But it will bear watching. At least, I hope it will, because it sounds really exciting.