A bottle of brandy “distilled from the essence of the coconut flower and … matured for a minimum of two years” is going for sale for a million bucks. Talk about value adding!
Biodiversity still valuable for medicines
Nature is still supplying more than two-thirds of all “new chemical entities” that end up approved as drugs, according to the third in a long-term series of studies by David Newman and Gordon Cragg. Their scientific study of drugs introduced between 1981 and mid 2006 is online here. The study also reveals that 2004 saw the lowest number of new drugs introduced since 1981. According to New Scientist magazine, which reports on the study:
“The dip was due in part to the international Convention on Biodiversity rules covering exploitation of natural resources, says Danna Leaman of the World Conservation Union’s medicinal plant specialist group. She says that the Convention, signed in 1992, has increased the bureaucracy and cost of getting people into the field to collect plants for drug discovery.”
The scientists and reporters conclude that diversity is a vital and extremely valuable resource in the search for blockbuster drugs. And so it is.
My real problem with this whole approach is that it fails to disentangle agricultural biodiversity, and as a result countries think that their agricultural diversity is going to produce the same pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. But while drug companies may discover their billion-dollar blockbusters in plants (and occasionally animals) they don’t harvest them directly. They mimic and alter the drugs and find ways to make them under their control. Agriculture is not like that. Genetic resources find their way into new varieties and breeds, which are then commercialized. But the amounts involved are nothing like those in the pharmaceutical world, and yet that’s the backdrop against which people discuss agricultural bio-piracy. Here’s hoping that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture does indeed ease access and share benefits, as it is intended to do, and that the flow of genetic material starts up again in earnest.
While we’re on the subject of lumping all biodiversity together, another academic study has produced a biodiversity map of the world. While a press release and a report or two mention ecosystem services, they don’t tell us to what extent the scientists examined either agricultural species or the genetic diversity within those species. And I have not yet been able to get to the scientific study to find out.
The rich tapestry of life
I hope I can finish posting this before the battery runs out on my laptop. It’s been one long power cut after another for the past couple of days and the one we’re experiencing at the moment started more than three hours back. Anyway, I thought this piece in EurekAlert really interesting and I couldn’t wait to blog about it. There’s this rare endemic plant on Mauritius called Trochetia blackburniana, you see, and it happens to be pollinated by the equally endemic gecko Phelsuma cepediana. But this is a day gecko, which means that to avoid predators they have to spend a lot of time hiding, and their favourite place for doing that is among the spiky leaves of Pandanus shrubs. Now, I’m not sure about Mauritius, but in lots of other places around the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Pandanus is a really useful plant: the fruits are eaten, the leaves woven into mats, people recognize and maintain dozens of varieties etc etc. So here’s something else that Pandanus is important for: protecting the pollinators of a rare Mauritian endemic.
P.S. Incidentally, Trochetia blackburniana, which is in the Malvaceae, seems to be one of the very few species of plants with coloured nectar.
Correction: Trochetia is actually in the Sterculiaceae. Apologies. Please read the comments for more interesting stuff on this genus.
Coconut information exchange
Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are really useful tools for networking and exchanging information on specific topics. There’s a Google Group on coconut which is really active and lively, and definitely worth keeping an eye on – and indeed joining – if you’re into things Cocos. All the more so as there’s a new addition to the information available, in the form of what promises to be a regular update from COGENT, the International Coconut Genetic Resources Network, on its poverty reduction activities. You can see the first newsletter here. Among various Yahoo Groups on coconut subjects there is the “People and Coconuts” group, which is described as being for people with “interesting coconut conundrums requiring answers.”
No longer in the dark about mushrooms
From India to South America. If you want to see how one farm has diversified into mushroom production, our friend Andy Jarvis has posted a set of informative photographs to flickr, the image sharing web site.