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Assyria in Gatersleben

I’m not sure if I said here that I visited IPK, the German national genebank, a few weeks ago. I did on Instagram.

Complementary #conservation #genebank #agrobiodiversity #germany

A post shared by Luigi Guarino (@ggguarino) on

Great facilities, great people, great work: but, though bigger and better resourced than average, in most ways like many other genebanks around the world. Except, that is, for the Assyrian relief in the entrance hall.

Well, the plaster cast of the Assyrian relief anyway. Nobody seemed to know where the original was, but there was general agreement that the copy was there because it depicted plant breeding. Of course, I took that as a challenge, and after a few minutes playing around with Google’s image search feature, I ran it to earth at the Met.

Each register of imagery shows a pair of supernatural figures flanking a stylized “sacred tree.” Further sacred trees can be seen to the left, and similar imagery continued around the room from which this slab came. The tree is thought to represent the prosperity and agricultural abundance of Assyria, and perhaps on one level the state itself. The supernatural figures are protective, and similar to those shown at larger scale throughout the palace. The gesture performed by the bird-headed figures with bucket and cone has been much discussed. One suggestion is that it symbolizes the fertilization of the land through the imagery of artificial date-palm fertilization, in which male date-spathes are used to fertilize female plants. The Assyrian term for the cone, however, seems to be “purifier,” and it is therefore likely that the symbolism has as much or more to do with magical protection.

So, maybe plant breeding, maybe not, but well worth having in the entrance lobby to a plant breeding institute containing a genebank.

But in locating the stela I ran across an article on Mesopotamian agriculture from the Oriental Institute that mentioned something called the Philadelphia Onion Archive.

No way to let that go either, naturally. It turns out that the Philadelphia Onion Archive really does consist of an archive of material on onions, kept in Philadelphia in the unwieldy shape of numerous clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform in the Akkadian language. Fortunately, there’s a translation online. Which means we know how many types of onions were grown during the reign of King Shar-Kali-Sharri, over 4,000 years ago.

And for how many places around the world can we say that even now?

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Golden Genes: The Movie

The frozen, bodiless genes of millions of plants, animals and humans are stored in biobanks around the world. They rekindle dreams of old: re-creating extinct species, ending world hunger, human life without illness or disease. But biobanks do more than that. They pose a fundamental question to our contemporary beliefs: What does it mean to be part of nature in the age of the genome?

Goldene Gene Trailer from Wolfgang Konrad on Vimeo.

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Foraging not scavenging

I have to say that I was a bit annoyed by this tweet from Bread for the World.

It’s not the promotion of gardening, of course. I’m all for gardening. It’s that word “scavenging,” with its negative connotations of rummaging through garbage. What’s so wrong about collecting edible plants from wild or semi-wild habitats? California’s native peoples used to do it, albeit as part of a very complex strategy of natural resources use and management.

Europeans viewed California Indians as having no concept of property, but they did recognize ownership based on usufruct of some resources, while setting others aside for communal purposes. Perhaps most important, as ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and Native Californians themselves remind us, they shaped the landscapes in which they lived through their extensive environmental knowledge, equivalent to our botany, ecology, ornithology, entomology, and more.

Chinese villagers in the Upper Yangtze still do it, and are saving the panda at the same time because of it.

“Wild harvesters are often some of the poorest people, because they don’t have access to land to farm,” says Natsya Timoshyna, the medicinal plants program leader at TRAFFIC, an anti-wildlife-trafficking organization that helped create FairWild.

Instead, these gatherers, like the villagers in China’s Upper Yangtze, are quietly responsible for maintaining the world’s supply of wild plants, a supply that provides medicine — as well as food — for up to 80 percent of the developing world.

And that’s just what has come through my feeds this week. Why not just use the term “foraging“? Am I missing something? Is support for wild-collected food seen as retrograde or imperialist or patriarchal?

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Whither agriculture?

FAO issued its report The future of food and agriculture: Trends and challenges a couple of months back, but I don’t think we mentioned it at the time, at least not in any detail.

Without a push to invest in and retool food systems, far too many people will still be hungry in 2030 — the year by which the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda has targeted the eradication of chronic food insecurity and malnutrition, the report warns.

I come back to it now because of a useful digest that Ensia has just put out, summarizing the trends analyzed by the report in 12 handy graphs, of which this is perhaps the scariest.

What’s to be done? There’s much talk in the report about “innovative systems that protect and enhance the natural resource base, while increasing productivity” and a “transformative process towards ‘holistic’ approaches, such as agroecology, agro-forestry, climate-smart agriculture and conservation agriculture, which also build upon indigenous and traditional knowledge.” Nothing specifically on conserving crop diversity, however, though I suppose it could be implied in some of the above. There was this, though:

On the path to sustainable development, all countries are interdependent. One of the greatest challenges is achieving coherent, effective national and international governance, with clear development objectives and commitment to achieving them. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development embodies such a vision – one that goes beyond the divide of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. Sustainable development is a universal challenge and the collective responsibility for all countries, requiring fundamental changes in the way all societies produce and consume.

The International Treaty on PGRFA, although also not mentioned by name, is of course predicated on this very interdependence, and coincidentally there was a major development on that last week:

Switzerland proposes that a new paragraph should be added below the current list of crops contained in Annex I. The new paragraph should read as follows:

“In addition to the Food Crops and Forages listed above, and in furtherance of the objectives and scope of the International Treaty, the Multilateral System shall cover all other plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in accordance with Article 3 of the International Treaty.”

Switzerland requests the Secretary of the International Treaty to communicate this submission prior to the next ordinary session of the Governing Body to all Contracting Parties in accordance with Art. 23.2 of the International Treaty.

That should make for an interesting meeting of the Governing Body later this year, and put the talk of “collective responsibility” to the test.