Posts

Posted on

Roundup on food composition, biodiversity and nutrition

FAO is leading global food composition activities since its beginning and has published several regional food composition tables. Since 1999, FAO is operating its food composition activities through INFOODS, the International Network of Food Data Systems, aiming to improve the quality, availability, reliability and use of food composition data. This fruitful collaboration has led to many instrumental standards, tools, databases and publications in the field of food composition, and more recently also on biodiversity. These public goods assist countries to generate, manage and use food composition data for different purposes. In collaboration with the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA) several documents on biodiversity and nutrition were elaborated, the most important being the Voluntary Guidelines for Mainstreaming Biodiversity into Policies, Programmes and National and Regional Plans of Action on Nutrition. This collaboration laid the foundation to more incorporation of nutrition into agriculture. The new tool ‘Nutrient Productivity Scale’, which combines yield, food composition and human nutrient requirements, may foster the inclusion of nutrition considerations into agriculture. The presentation will guide through all achievements over the last 15 and more years of food composition, biodiversity and part of nutrition-sensitive agriculture, its links within and outside FAO and will provide some food for thoughts for the future of food composition in FAO.

The presentation is online, and is well worth listening to in full.

The bit about the “Nutrient productivity scale” sounds a lot like something we talked about here some time back, and starts about 40 minutes in.

Posted on

Squeezing olives

BTW, if you want to see what that “olive plague” we blogged about a few days ago looks like, here’s a despatch from the front lines by our intrepid photojournalist on the spot, Layla.

Incidentally, my attention has coincidentally recently been drawn to the Bioresources For Oliviculture (BeFOre) project (emphasis added):

The project aims at establishing a multi-lateral network of research and innovation staff active in OLIVE germplasm access, conservation, evaluation and exploitation, strengthening research capacities through the exchange of knowledge and expertise on a shared research programme focused on establishing integrated common protocols to phenotype and characterize plants at molecular, morphological and physiological level, and evaluating the olive oil quality related to varieties. Particular attention will be paid at establishing the international intellectual property rights for conserving and exchanging the olive genetic resources. The involvement of some Non Academic Organizations will allow the sharing of knowledge and ideas from research to all levels of the olive production chain, from plant propagation to fruit production and oil extraction (and vice-versa).

The bit about IPR is important because olives are not on Annex 1 of the International Treaty, at least for now, and one of the deliverables of the project is:

Core set of genotypes present in the main olive cultivar collections and grown under different agro-environmental conditions to evaluate their agronomical performance

Hopefully some of those genotypes are going to be of use against Xylella, either directly or through breeding.

Posted on

Brainfood: Arracacha diversity, Mediterranean diet, Asian sheep & goats, Alpine flax, Breeding efficiency, Models, Domestication & seed size, Palm uses, CC & production, Insecticide & diversity

Posted on

Italian olives still in trouble

In case you were wondering, the latest on the “olive plague” (Xylella fastidiosa) is that it’s spreading through the so-called containment areas. Oh joy.

It’s apparently all the fault of the “authorities,” according to a new audit of the control efforts, reported in Nature.

The commission’s audit, published on 31 May, includes a litany of failures by Italian authorities. It says that systematic monitoring of the infection began too late, and that there were ‘excessive delays’ in uprooting some infected trees. And the report charges that national and regional authorities have disbursed little more than half of the €10 million (US$11.2 million) budgeted for containment measures. Data obtained by Nature add further evidence of a slow response. In most of 2016, Italian laboratories processed almost no Xylella samples — indicating that monitoring had almost ceased (see ‘Lab drought’). Authorities did not respond to requests for comment.

But fear not…

There is some good news. Scientists in Puglia have identified two varieties of olive tree that are relatively resistant to the disease. Last month, the commission proposed that these could be planted in infected areas, to replace dead trees. But work to develop fully resistant trees could take a decade or more, says Martelli.

What a time to be alive.

Posted on

Some new germplasm databases, at least to me

Long-time readers may remember a post from 2012 summarizing some media reports of trouble at the Italian national genebank at the National Research Council (CNR), Bari. But maybe things are not as bad as were made out at the time. Or have got better.

I’ve just come across what seems to be a fairly new website for the genebank and it doesn’t give the impression of crisis. It lists 57,568 accessions from 184 genera and 834 species, which is more that was reported back in 1999 in WIEWS for ITA004, hopefully the correct code for the genebank in question (at least the address matches, if not the name of the institute). This is the geographic coverage of the collection:

Impressive. Unfortunately, data on these accessions are not available in the European genebank database, Eurisco, and therefore they’re not in the global portal, Genesys, either. Hopefully that’s being rectified.

Since I’m on the subject of germplasm databases, I’ve also recently come across the Legume Information System, which focuses on material in the US genebanks. It has all kinds of data, but I just looked for germplasm from Italy to compare with what’s in Bari. Here’s the map for Medicago spp, showing growth habit in different colours (click on it to see it better).

Compare and contrast with the ITA004 collection for the same species.

Which is why it’s a good idea to have all these data together in one place, i.e. Genesys.