Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
#sabiennial a glimpse and summary of aspects of the state of plant #biodiversity pic.twitter.com/fwDnquaPoN
— Donat Agosti (@myrmoteras) August 28, 2015
Not much better for crop wild relatives, I suspect. And this doesn’t even mention genetic diversity. And the clock is ticking.
Wonderful to see indigenous leaders from the Parque de la Papa — joined by Alejandro Argumedo of Asociacion ANDES, the Director General of FAO, Graziano de Silva, and Marie Haga of the Global Crop Diversity Trust — deposit botanical seeds of their native potatoes, which they themselves produced with help from CIP, in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. A great example of collaboration and complementarity between on farm and ex situ conservation.
Here is the panorama of the Banaue Rice Terraces from Chris's drone, 23 August 2015.
Posted by Gene Hettel on Tuesday, 25 August 2015
In my defence, I have visited the ASTI website before. Just not in a while, unfortunately. And I therefore missed a lot of developments. So thank you, Jeremy, for sending me there again earlier today. But let’s step back a bit. What is ASTI, anyway?
Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) provides trusted open-source data on agricultural research systems across the developing world. Led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), ASTI works with a large network of national collaborators to collect, compile, and disseminate information on financial, human, and institutional resources at both country and regional levels across government, higher education, nonprofit, and (where possible) private for-profit agricultural research agencies.
Very laudable. There’s a lot of useful stuff on the website, organized by country and region, but also covering the CGIAR centres. And the last is what I would like to focus on for a minute here. ASTI is hosting two projects tracking the adoption of improved varieties in South Asia and Africa. The raw data is downloadable, but there are useful summary graphics, though I would have liked them to be more easily sharable (the following examples are screenshots).
So, if we take as an example pigeonpeas in Madhya Pradesh, we get this overview:
And a time line of releases:
And, perhaps most interestingly, the level of adoption of the main varieties:
And if you’re interested in that 37% share, and I know you are, you can find out all about the variety in question, ICPL 87119 (otherwise known as Asha) from ICRISAT.