- Agricultural intensification, dietary diversity, and markets in the global food security narrative. Intensification is all well and good but it needs to be sustainable and nutrition-sensitive.
- Health, Seeds, Diversity and Terraces. Maybe evolutionary plant breeding can help with that.
- Identification of barley powdery mildew resistances in gene bank accessions and the use of gene diversity for verifying seed purity and authenticity. It’s difficult to deal with heterogeneous accessions.
- The USD 1,875.95 Seed Center. A serious-looking community seed bank in Bangladesh.
- Assessing agroecosystem sustainability in Cuba: A new agrobiodiversity index. Not same as the old index.
- North American Crop Wild Relatives, Volume 1. Volume 1?
- Ex-situ conservation strategies for endangered plants in the Israel Gene Bank. Not just crops, and not just conservation…
- The Institute of Evolution Wild Cereal Gene Bank at the University of Haifa. …and not even the only genebank in Israel.
- Assessing Genetic Diversity to Breed Competitive Biofortified Wheat With Enhanced Grain Zn and Fe Concentrations. Four translocations from rye and various Aegilops species have resulted in 8 biofortified bread wheat varieties after a decade of work. Compare and contrast with potatoes.
- Improving efficiency of seed system by appropriating farmer’s rights in India through adoption and implementation of policy of quality declared seed schemes in parallel. FAO’s Quality Declared Seed (QDS) system is the way to go.
- Collecting wild Miscanthus germplasm in Asia for crop improvement and conservation in Europe whilst adhering to the guidelines of the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity. It can be done.
- Making friends in the field: How to become an ethnobotanist – A personal reflection. Yes, it can.
- Mainstreaming Underutilized Indigenous and Traditional Crops into Food Systems: A South African Perspective. Start by having researchers translate their findings for policy makers.
- Genotyping by sequencing (GBS) and SNP marker analysis of diverse accessions of pecan (Carya illinoinensis). Geographic patterning of genetic diversity and SNPs for dichogamy found.
- Trait-based evaluation of plant assemblages in traditional farm ponds in Korea: Ecological and management implications. Dumbeongs are carefully managed. Well there’s a shocker.
- Conservation gap analysis of crop wild relatives in Turkey. There still are some.
- An in situ approach to the conservation of temperate cereal crop wild relatives in the Mediterranean Basin and Asian centre of diversity. 10 locations would do.
- Molecular characterization and identification of new sources of tolerance to submergence and salinity from rice landraces of coastal India. 5 of 98 accessions had novel alleles.
Crowdsourcing agrobiodiversity for nutrition
Food Policy has a special issue out on Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia. There’s my weekend gone. And yours, I suspect. Let’s try something. If you find any references to the role of crop diversity in general or genebanks in particular in the seven papers included, stick it in the comments below, or on the Genebank Platform Facebook page if you prefer. I’ll try to pull it all together when I have a chance. Let’s do this.
High on the hog
While this study has focused on the internal dynamics, it is important to note that China’s contemporary pork industry relies on – and is altering – global resources and markets. With 21 per cent of the world’s population but only 9 per cent of arable land, feeding China’s pigs without starving China’s people has required re-routing international trade, investment and resource flows. In 2014, China imported almost 60 per cent of the total global soybean trade (70 million tonnes) for its livestock feed industry; maize imports are also rising, and the party-state increasingly supports Chinese agribusiness firms to ‘go out’ (zou chuqu) to seek access to land, resources and markets abroad. In terms of ramping up pork production while avoiding widespread hunger, the development model has been successful: although food security remains a focus for the state (and a problem especially for poor rural populations), for those who can afford it, modern life means living high on the hog.
How can you possibly resist a piece that ends like that? It’s from Reforming the Humble Pig: Pigs, Pork and Contemporary China by Mindi Schneider, the final chapter in Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. The whole thing is open access, courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
Brainfood: Tibetan barley, Eastern Sahel domestication, CC & coffee, Good bugs, Garden Organic, Amazonian domestication, Maize domestication, Maize & CC, Acidless citrus, Seed commons book, Crispy blueberry, African hunter-gatherers, Indian forages, Brazilian PGR, Cloudberry picking, Wheat & CC
- Origin and evolution of qingke barley in Tibet. Tibetan barley was introduced from the southwest.
- On the Origins and Dissemination of Domesticated Sorghum and Pearl Millet across Africa and into India: a View from the Butana Group of the Far Eastern Sahel. Sorghum and pearl millet got to India from Sudan. No word on whether they ever got to Tibet.
- Was there ever a Neolithic in the Neotropics? Plant familiarisation and biodiversity in the Amazon. Depends on how you define it.
- The earliest maize from San Marcos Tehuacán is a partial domesticate with genomic evidence of inbreeding. The earliest proto-maize was inbred.
- Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change on Traditional Mexican Maize Suitability and Indigenous Communities in Mexico. Landraces are going to lose half their area of suitability.
- Why could the coffee crop endure climate change and global warming to a greater extent than previously estimated? Because of carbon dioxide?
- Understanding and exploiting plant beneficial microbes. We’re going to need microbial consortia.
- Genetic analysis of a heritage variety collection. The Heritage Seed Library, in fact.
- Noemi Controls Production of Flavonoid Pigments and Fruit Acidity and Illustrates the Domestication Routes of Modern Citrus Varieties. In citron, limetta, sweet lime, lemon, and sweet orange, acidless phenotypes are associated with large deletions or insertions of retrotransposons in a single gene. Some of them go back a long way, and are associated with ritual use in Jewish culture.
- Introduction: Commoning the seeds: the future of agrobiodiversity and food security. Is there a way out of the current impasse? Maybe.
- Molecular and Genetic Bases of Fruit Firmness Variation in Blueberry—A Review. It’s still unclear whether firmness is a quantitative trait or monogenic.
- Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories following the rise of farming in East Africa. Hunter-gatherers were more inventive in Africa than in Europe in the face of agricultural expansion.
- Tropical Forage Legumes in India: Status and Scope for Sustaining Livestock Production. >3200 accessions conserved, >50 cultivars released.
- Conservation of crop genetic resources in Brazil in the context of the target 9 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. A lot done, a lot still to do. CWR remain a gap.
- The Impacts of Climate and Social Changes on Cloudberry (Bakeapple) Picking: a Case Study from Southeastern Labrador. Social changes have been more significant, but for how long?
- Global wheat production with 1.5 and 2.0°C above pre‐industrial warming. Frequency of extreme low yields and variability will increase in hot places like India. Assuming no new varieties.
The meat and potatoes of the healthy diets debate
And here is the EAT-Lancet report in all its glory, as promised.
Give me a day or two to, ahem, digest it…
#EATLancet: Diet and food production must radically change to improve health and avoid potentially catastrophic damage to the planet @EATForum #foodcanfixit https://t.co/bcVFoSZNtm pic.twitter.com/lD5i0EOjA1
— The Lancet (@TheLancet) January 17, 2019