Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Marty wants to point out that someone else beat USDA to GRIN-Global adoption:
Footnote #2 – our friends at the Czech Republic Crop Research Institute also have GRIN-Global fully up and running.
True, and very much due to the unstinting efforts of the late, much missed Dr Iva Faberova.
The Global Panel on Agriculture, Food Systems and Nutrition has come out with a Statement on Climate Change, Food Systems and Nutrition, in the run-up to a side event at COP21 in Paris. Nothing particularly surprising there, but I just wanted to highlight two things. First, I was impressed by how the problem was set out:
Climate change is expected to push down global farm output by 2% per decade between now and 2050. Demand for food is expected to rise substantially during that same period.
Yes, those fancy IPCC synthesis diagrams (see below) are cool and everything, but there’s a lot to be said for the directness and starkness of those two sentences. Sometimes a few well-chosen words are better than a picture.
Then there are the policy recommendations:
1. Include diet quality goals with adaptation targets proposed for climate action.
2. Diversify agricultural investments, factoring in the local realities of ecological sustainability and comparative advantage.
3. Support greater food system efficiency so that outputs per unit of water, energy, land, and other inputs are optimised and the footprint of agriculture and non-farm activities are better managed to meet both food demand and higher-quality diets.
4. Integrate measures to improve climate change resilience and the nutritional value of crop and livestock products along the value chain, from production to marketing.
5. Protect the diet quality of the poor in the face of supply shocks and growing food demand through social protection, for example.
6. Promote the generation and use of rigorous evidence on appropriate investments along food value-chains, which are resilient to climate change and also deliver positive dietary outcomes and support improved nutrition.
And it’s striking how agricultural biodiversity in one way or another could be argued to underpin all of these.
Those who follow such things will no doubt be as excited as we are about the fact that USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System has just switched over from its old workhorse documentation system, GRIN, to the young pretender, GRIN-Global. ((Though CIMMYT actually beat them to it.)) You can access all the passport, characterization and evaluation data USDA has on its 574,764 accessions from the GRIN-Global website. What the user sees on the public interface when searching for and ordering germplasm, though, is only a small part of the picture. All USDA genebank staff around the country are also using the Curator Tool to manage their collections and fulfil order requests. It’s been a massive undertaking. And the software is actually available to all. So if you’re a genebank curator and would like to experiment with the same documentation system that the mighty NPGS uses, check it out.
As it happens, we’ve also just come across a case of a user downloading some GRIN data and serving it up on its own. The good folks at Widespread Malus have extracted all the Malus sieversii data and stuck them in an Excel spreadsheet, to make things even easier for wild apple enthusiasts. Nice idea.
Attentive readers will know I occasionally take swipes at the state of genetic resources information systems, both in the crops and domestic livestock areas. But as far as the latter is concerned it’s getting more and more difficult to do so, a twinge of jealousy being the more usual reaction. Take for example the fact that you can now download the results of distribution modelling, under various climate change scenarios, for 8800 livestock breeds, as recorded in the Domestic Animal Diversity Information system (DAD-IS). Here they are for Vietnam’s Ga Dong Tao chicken. Light green is the area currently suitable, red is the area suitable in 2050, dark green is the area suitable under both current and future conditions. The grey polygon is the reported distribution of the breed.
I suspect it will be some time before we’re able to do something similar for crops.