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The First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition

I was pretty blown away by a student video on biodiversity that I first saw at Evolving Thoughts, a science blog. It is a really classy little film, one I would have been proud to have made myself, a rapid romp through the entire subject of biodiversity and why it matters. But — you knew there was going to be a but — the entire thing devoted about half a sentence to agricultural biodiversity, and even then it was a throwaway line about food coming “from nature”.

Well, that just won’t do. So Luigi and I had a quick conversation and decided to launch the First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition: make a better movie (which we will interpret very liberally — animation, Ken Burns-style stills, whatever) and focus on agricultural biodiversity. Perhaps there should be a second category for posters?

We haven’t yet decided on a prize (how about an iPod nano?) or the detailed rules or the closing date or how to enter or how the winner will be decided. But we’re announcing it now so that people have a chance to prepare their entries. Maybe it should run for a year? Help us, please, by sending us your comments on this hare-brained scheme and also making it known to anyone and everyone who might be interested.

The Rules are here. If you don’t like them, tell us why.

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Visualizing data

Stop press: Google bought Gapminder yesterday. Thanks Patchwork Planet. Still no sign of any good Ag data though.

Google has started hosting Gapminder, a wonderful tool for visualizing development data developed by a Swedish NGO. Here’s an example of what you can do with it. Worth playing around with. But to see a master at work, check this out. There are only a few variables at the moment, but wouldn’t it be great if one day the data in FAOSTAT were to be added? Anyone want to volunteer to do the mash-up?

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Wild sheep don’t drift

The moufflon is a wild sheep from Corsica, Sardina and Cyprus. In 1957, a male and a female from Corsica were taken to another island, this one in the southern Indian Ocean, in an attempt to establish a herd for sport hunting. The pair thrived on Haute Island, and the resulting population peaked at about 700 head in the 1970’s, thereafter oscillating between 200 and 600. Ok, so far so weird, but so what? Well it turns out that genetic diversity hasn’t behaved as expected. By rights in such a small, isolated, inbred population it should have decreased markedly as a result of genetic drift. But according to this, it hasn’t. The reason is probably strong natural selection, according to the authors of the study, who compared DNA from the original founding couple to that of the present herd.

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Trees in Kenya

There were two interesting articles about trees in Kenya in the Money section of this morning’s Daily Nation. Not online, though, so I’ll have to summarize. One piece describes how farmers in Nyeri are adopting a number of short-statured mango varieties from South Africa and Israel, apparently including things called Apple, Kent, Vydke and Tommy. This is not a mango-growing region, but these particular varieties have been found to be a good fit on the small farms of the area, to yield heavily and early, and to be good for juice. So now there’s no need to truck mangoes in from the coast. Good for Nyeri farmers, perhaps not so good for coast farmers? This may not be a zero-sum game: I don’t know enough about the supply of, and demand for, mango in Kenya to predict what will happen, but I would try to conserve those coastal varieties ex situ somewhere just to be on the safe side.

Then there was also a piece on how the Tree Biotechnology Project has been successful in cloning a number of indigenous trees (including for example Prunus africana, whose bark feeds a large international market for a prostate cancer drug) and providing planting materials to farmers. It seems previously the project’s focus has been on eucalypts. This is expected to take pressure off wild populations and contribute to reforestation, but there was nothing in the Daily Nation article about the downside of planting large areas of genetically identical clones. However, this is clearly a problem the project recognizes, as you can see for example by reading on page 28 of this brief on some of its activities:

Planting large areas of single clones will have the effect of decreasing rather than increasing biodiversity, and the risk of narrowing the genetic base needs to be managed to avoid growing pest and disease problems. Mondi has a policy to restrict planting of a single clone to no more than 5% of any planting area, and the project is adhering to this policy. In order to maintain biodiversity, the project team will select a wide range of local tree species of economic value and will feed these into the clonal production system through adaptive tissue culture research. Once the capacity to adapt the techniques of micro-propagation to different species is fully in place, there will be great potential for the project to multiply and disseminate a wide range of improved germplasm of different tree species, including those that are under threat of over-exploitation and extinction, such as ebony.