Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

May 16, 2017May 16, 2017

Kew helping protect your morning joe

Remember a short blog post from seven years back saying how Ethiopia had just protected some wild coffee forests?

We Nibbled yesterday a UN press release saying that a Biosphere Reserve had been created in Ethiopia to protect wild coffee. But actually it turns out that it is no less than TWO reserves that have just been selected by UNESCO, Kafa and Yayu. Many thanks to Tadesse Woldemariam Gole for the tip.

No, I didn’t think so. But anyway, here’s the latest on that, courtesy of the coffee team at Kew.

In April 2015 we started the three year project ‘Mainstreaming biodiversity conservation and climate resilience at Yayu Biosphere Reserve (Ethiopia)’. In this project, poverty alleviation, biodiversity, and climate resilience, are inextricably linked.
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The project has now been running for almost two years, and despite a few surprises, is achieving considerable success. Catch-up on our progress in the second part of this post, available in the coming months.

Previous experience in this sort of thing has been mixed, so I’m looking forward to hearing more. In the coming months.

May 16, 2017

Genetic erosion: it’s complicated

From the CIAT blog:

Putting true numbers on diversity loss turns out to be a complicated and contested business, with no shortage of strong opinions. One big part of the problem is that there aren’t many good ways to count the diversity that existed before it disappeared. Researchers have done some work to assess the changes in diversity in crop varieties of Green Revolution cereals, and to some degree on the genetic diversity within those varieties. The results indicate that, although diversity on farms decreased when farmers first replaced traditional varieties with modern types, the more recent trends are not so simple to decipher.

My work here is done.

May 15, 2017May 15, 2017

Brainfood: Canola model, Saline dates, High rice, Perennial wheat, European cowpea, Mesoamerican oil palm, Seed viability, Citrus identity, Poor cassava, Horse domestication, Wild tomatoes, Tea genome, Veggie breeding, Classical brassicas

Development of a Statistical Crop Model to Explain the Relationship between Seed Yield and Phenotypic Diversity within the Brassica napus Genepool. Look for primary raceme area.
Screening of Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) Cultivars for Salinity Tolerance. In Oman, Manoma and Umsila are particularly tolerant.
Genetic structure and isolation by altitude in rice landraces of Yunnan, China revealed by nucleotide and microsatellite marker polymorphisms. Geneflow is horizontal, adaptation vertical.
Breeding Perennial Grain Crops Based on Wheat. By adding a wild genome.
European cowpea landraces for a more sustainable agriculture system and novel foods. 24 of them, no less. But you have to start somewhere, I suppose.
Genetic diversity of Elaeis oleifera (HBK) Cortes populations using cross species SSRs: implication’s for germplasm utilization and conservation. From 532 palms in 19 populations to 34 individuals.
Large-Scale Screening of Intact Tomato Seeds for Viability Using Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS). Good-bye germination tests?
Genetic identification of ‘Limau Kacang’ (Citrus sp.), a local mandarin cultivated in West Sumatra by sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP). It’s a ponkan.
Cassava haplotype map highlights fixation of deleterious mutations during clonal propagation. Cassava is decaying genetically, but breeders are helping.
Ancient genomic changes associated with domestication of the horse. The ancient DNA of immediate post-domestication horses suggests that the stallion bottleneck happened later.
Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Two Tomato Species from the Galapagos Islands. They mirror island formation.
The Tea Tree Genome Provides Insights into Tea Flavor and Independent Evolution of Caffeine Biosynthesis. It evolved caffeine independently of coffee but not cacao. And flavour is down to a whole genome duplication.
The contribution of international vegetable breeding to private seed companies in India. It can still make one, but for traits rather than varieties.
Domestication, diversity and use of Brassica oleracea L., based on ancient Greek and Latin texts. Their use as a hangover cure has a long and august pedigree. No word on their raceme area.

May 12, 2017May 12, 2017

Nutrition toolkit all set to make agriculture oh so sensitive

FAO’s Toolkit on Nutrition-sensitive Agriculture and Food Systems is out. Without a huge amount of fanfare, as far as I can tell, which is a bit surprising. Anyway, good to see agrobiodiversity properly highlighted in multiple places, including as an entry point for various interventions, and as part of several indicators.

Meanwhile, that call for best practices for healthy food systems (which means nutrition-sensitive, among other things), is still open.

May 12, 2017May 12, 2017

The price of tea in Kenya

“When countries change their trade policies to protect themselves against price falls, small farmers – particularly those in developing countries – tend to lose profits,” said Will Martin, senior research fellow at IFPRI. “This platform gives governments access to the most recent information available, so they can make informed decisions on food policy that avoid creating global price instability.”

“This platform” is Ag-Incentives, and it’s just been launched by IFPRI.

Policies that affect incentives for agricultural production, such as those that raise prices on domestic markets, can artificially distort the global market, which then undermine market opportunities for small farmers in the world. Ag-Incentives allows users to compare indicators, such as nominal rates of protection, across countries and years.

At the moment, it seems that it is only “nominal rates of protection” (NRP) that are being compared, across countries and years, but that will no doubt change as the platform evolves. What are NRPs?

…the price difference, expressed as a percentage, between the farm gate price received by producers and an undistorted reference price at the farm gate level.

The “undistorted price” being “generally taken to be the border price adjusted for transportation and marketing costs.”

If I understand this correctly, if NRP is negative, the commodity is being taxed, positive and it is being subsidised. This is the picture for tea in Kenya, as an example.

I’ll run it by the mother-in-law to see if she can make some sense of it, in particular what happened in 2006 and 2014.