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Buzz on GM crops and bees

We’ve written a bit here about pollinator problems. The looming shortage of bees in the US, and in Spain. We pointed to a piece that said maybe the problems in the US weren’t any worse than they had been, just better reported. Maybe the problem is monoculture? Throughout the recent buzz of hive-related news, though, we’ve ignored a few items that laid the blame on GMO crops. Why? Because they seemed a bit shrill, maybe even a tad one-sided. But a long and apparently comprehensive piece in the German news magazine Der Spiegel is neither shrill nor one-sided. And it seems to adduce good evidence that bees who are suffering a parasite infestation are abnormally susceptible to pollen from maize engineered to express the Bt bacterial toxin from Bacillus thuringiensis.

The work Der Spiegel reports is a long way from conclusive. But it does give pause for thought, and it is causing huge excitement among opponents of GM in all its forms. At the very least, it deserves a closer look. But wouldn’t it be weird if it proved true? And how would industrial agriculture respond?

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Of dung, mites and llamas

Researchers are counting fossilized dung-eating mites in the sediments of an Andean lake to get an idea of the size of llama herds in the surroundings, and thus “reconstruct the fluctuating fortunes of local (human) populations for an era from which no written records exist.” It turns out that “mite numbers rise and fall in concert with well-documented socio-economic changes in the postconquest period.” The paper is in the Journal of Archaeological Science, but you can read a summary here.

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Child malnutrition in Uganda

Some clues in a newspaper article that is unfortunately not online led me to a East African Journal of Medicine paper on levels of malnutrition in a Ugandan village. The researchers found that “young children in Kabarole district suffer from severe chronic malnutrition rates, but rates and feeding patterns are not different in AIDS affected versus non AIDS affected homes.” This last finding may be because children also benefit from the attempts of care-givers to improve the nutrition of AIDS sufferers in the family. Here’s a key recommendation:

Poverty plays a key role in this situation, but there are cost-effective interventions locally available to reduce chronic malnutrition in children. It may require shifting food production to more nutritious foods and foods that are new for this area such as orange fleshed sweet potatoes with higher energy density and protein rich beans.

Sounds like a place where CIP’s VITAA Project could do some good.

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Millennium Villages

There was a long piece in the Sunday Standard yesterday on one (in fact, the first) of the so-called Millennium Villages, Sauri in Siaya District, Western Kenya. An initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University launched in 2004, the Millennium Villages project aims “to demonstrate how the eight Millennium Development Goals can be met in rural Africa within five years through community-led development.”

The Millennium Village effort is explicitly linked to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and addresses an integrated and scaled-up set of interventions covering food production, nutrition, education, health services, roads, energy, communications, water, sanitation, enterprise diversification and environmental management. This has never been done before.

Twelve villages were chosen in sub-Saharan Africa: these were all located in hunger hotpots, but different agro-ecological zones. The Sauri experience seems to be very positive, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly what sort of agricultural interventions have been tried. Maize yields have gone up dramatically, but why exactly? Better access to fertilizers (because of subsidized prices) is probably one reasons, though “fertilizer trees” (for more on these, see this separate piece from SciDevNet, which coincidentally came out a couple of days back) and other nitrogen-fixing species seem to also have been tried to improve fallows. A detailed report mentions indigenous vegetables, but little else in the way of agrobiodiversity-related interventions (or indeed baseline information) as far as the crops are concerned. A pity.

The BBC has some pictures of Sauri here.

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Domestication

Michael’s post on water buffalo genetic diversity and domestication reminded me that I was intending to point you all in the direction of Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog. Although Dienekes mainly blogs about the genetic diversity and evolution of humans, he does occasionally link to papers on animal domestication and related issues. He has an RSS feed, which makes it easy to monitor his blog. In the past couple of years he has pointed to interesting papers on:

Incidentally, a great paper reviewing the use of genetics and archaeology to document domestication came out last year and you can see the abstract here. Now, what’s really needed is for someone to bring together the human, livestock and crop genetic data.