Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 5, 2015February 4, 2015

Mchele ni kila kitu

Well, actually the quote in National Geographic’s blockbuster on food — The Next Green Revolution ¹ — is “Mihogo ni kila kitu,” which means “cassava is everything” in Kiswahili. I changed it to “rice is everything” because I want to highlight the illustrations in the article that shows the pedigree of IR64 Sub1, IRRI’s famous flood-tolerant rice. There’s also fun stuff in the article about cassava, and other crops, but I’ll leave that to you for now.

You know we’re great fans of pedigree diagrams here on the blog, because they’re so good at showing how important it is for crop breeding programmes to have ready access to the widest possible range of genetic diversity, from as many different places as possible, preferably in a genebank. Anyway, I don’t of course know what it looks like on your screen, but on mine the illustration was disappointing. If you see the whole pedigree, then you don’t see the caption; if you get one of the captions, then you only see part of the pedigree; and you can’t see both captions at once. So I’ve taken the liberty of putting the whole thing together. Here it is. You can click on it to see it better. I hope you like it. And I hope National Geographic doesn’t sue us.

February 4, 2015February 4, 2015

CGIAR to listen — again

There are “cross-cutting topics of global importance — women and youth; climate change; and capacity development — [that] will systematically strengthen and build coherence in research across all domains and Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDOs).” Should not conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity be one of these?

We posed that trenchant, though perhaps predictable, question last November, as CGIAR asked all and sundry for input on their new Strategy and Results Framework (SRF). Well, all and sundry have been heard, and the new version of the SRF is out. The answer to our question is, alas, no. The cross-cutting themes — now gender and youth, climate change, policies and institutions, and capacity development — still do not include agrobiodiversity.

But leaving it at that would be unfair. Remember that in the old SRF, as we pointed out last time, “use of genetic diversity … only contribute[s] to the reduced poverty outcome, and then only via increased agricultural productivity.” Here’s the chart to jog your memory, and sorry again for the poor quality. The sub-IDO in question is the one that breaks the symmetry of the left-hand column, click on the image to see it a bit better:

Here’s the new schema, thankfully now more legible:

Equally thankfully, conservation of genetic resources now contributes to the System Level Outcome of improved food and nutrition security for health, in addition to that of reduced poverty. See that little extra line going right and up from the IDO of increased productivity? That’s what a small victory, of sorts, looks like. And there are additional sub-IDOs that we can also get behind:

Increased genetic diversity of agricultural and associated landscapes.
Agricultural systems diversified and intensified in ways that protect soil and water.
Optimized consumption of diverse nutrient-rich foods.

So I guess we can say that people saying things very much like those we say here have been heard, at least a little bit. Let the second round of consultations begin! The Consortium Board and then the Funders Council sign off on the SRF in March and April, respectively.

February 3, 2015February 4, 2015

The US picks…wheat

Nice to see a commercial airing during the Super Bowl that highlighted the importance of biodiversity in general and agricultural biodiversity in particular.

http://youtu.be/pkPZ-xW1DM4

Not so cool that they managed to ascribe the origin of wheat to the wrong continent, and indeed hemisphere, but I guess they were thinking of those amber waves. For me, the US should have picked the cranberry. Complements anything.

February 3, 2015February 3, 2015

Celebrating the ICARDA genebank

More information on the ceremony for that award that the ICARDA genebank is to receive next month. It’s unclear to me from the invitation pamphlet to what extent the general public will be allowed in, but if you’re in Berlin on 19 March and would really like to go, my suggestion is to contact the Gregor Mendel Foundation and find out if they’ll let you register. You have until 4 March to do so. Looks like it’ll be quite a party.

February 3, 2015February 3, 2015

What a difference an en makes: kombucha != konbucha

Last week The Economist carried an article about kokumi, a putative sixth flavour longing to take its place alongside umami. In it, I read that:

Dr Sasano supplemented the diets of his volunteers with kombucha, an umami-rich infusion of kelp.

That brought me up short. As far as I know, kombucha is a sort of fermented sweet tea. I shared my perplexity on social media. Back, eventually, came a reply. ² “I think it’s a classic case of the anglicised word being ascribed the wrong meaning,” said my friend who has lived in Japan, helpfully pointing me to the introductory paragraph in the Wikipedia article on kombucha:

In Japan, Konbucha (昆布茶, “kelp tea”) refers to a different beverage made from dried and powdered kombu (an edible kelp from the Laminariaceae family). For the origin of the English word kombucha, first recorded in 1995 and of uncertain etymology, the American Heritage Dictionary suggests: “Probably from Japanese kombucha, tea made from kombu (the Japanese word for kelp perhaps being used by English speakers to designate fermented tea due to confusion or because the thick gelatinous film produced by the kombucha culture was thought to resemble seaweed).”

So, that settles it? Not quite. For the original paper by Sasano et al. actually says:

We used Japanese Kobucha (kelp tea: tea made of powdered tangle seaweed) …

I can only guess that somewhere along the line a dumb spell-checker or an intelligent Economist proofreader overstepped the mark. Or, just possibly, the original authors got it wrong.