Posts

Posted on

Where exactly is that zeitgeist?

Something is up, Jeremy said a couple of days ago, by way of introduction to a pair of pieces which he suggested, tongue no doubt at least partly in cheek, showed “the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change.”

Well, if something was up, it is now firmly down, and as for the zeitgeist, its name is biotech. Because yesterday some of the masterminds behind GM won the World Food Prize. And, probably not coincidentally, the Rt Hon Owen Paterson, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, gave a speech to Rothamsted Research which ended with this rousing call:

GM isn’t necessarily about making life easier for farmers or making their businesses more profitable, although I believe that there are great opportunities for the industry. It’s about finding non-chemical solutions to pests and diseases. It’s about fortifying food with vitamin A so that children in the poorest countries don’t go blind or die. It’s about making crops durable enough to survive sustained drought. It’s about developing new medicines. It’s about feeding families in some of the poorest parts of the world. We cannot expect to feed tomorrow’s population with yesterday’s agriculture. We have to use every tool at our disposal.

Meanwhile, the search for that elusive middle ground, in which every tool at our disposal is not only used, but gets an equal chance to be honed and oiled, continues.

LATER: How would you facilitate a truly constructive debate about that middle ground? Here’s how NOT to do it:

Setting up a debate that is framed around risk, rather than food politics, focused on a single subset of technology, rather than one that explores all the options, structured around science in an area where questions about outcomes are impossible to answer with certainty, about a technology that has unclear benefits to the public and the developing world but very obvious benefits to large firms that the public distrusts (partly because of their unclear relationships to politicians), seems to me at least like a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Posted on

Plant breeding as a public good. Again.

Back in February 2012 we were happy to spread the word about the first Student Organic Seed Symposium, in Vermont in the US. We heard no more about it, of course. 1 Such is our institutional memory, however, that an official report on the meeting, in a proper journal no less, caught our eye and demanded to be shared.

It’s an interesting read, and full of hope. There is clearly a demand for breeding to meet the needs of not just organic but other sorts of what might be called “proper” farming. 2 And there are young professionals who want to meet those demands. The tricky part is how to make it pay. From the brief details in the report, it seems that US government funding and private philanthropy are helping to train breeders and support specific breeding programmes, a return to plant breeding as a public good. Will that be enough?

Posted on

Dog domestication controversy growls away

Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.

Sound familiar? Remember the chicken story? It’s a genomic jungle out there.

LATER: A jungle that goes way back.

Posted on

Varieties of climate change

Something is up, no doubt about it. First off, PBS in the US has a longish news report on how farmers in India “find promise in ancient seeds”.

Watch Struggling Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Strangely, although the farmers are able to find promise in ancient seeds, the report claims that seeds stored at IRRI in the 1960s are too ancient to be viable. Not sure how that works.

One of the protagonists of the PBS video, Debal Deb, crops up again in another video that came to light on the PAR website. According to PAR: “This film follows the construction of a new seed bank premises in Odisha, a venture that provides a potent symbol of Debal’s values”.

With the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change, it is good to be reminded that droughts are diverse too. David Lobell looks at two recent scientific papers on drought tolerance. One shows very little difference between specifically “drought-tolerant” maize varieties and other varieties without the drought-tolerance genes.

To me, there are a couple of possible ways to interpret this. One is that the newer varieties being marketed by companies are not really much better in general. Or these results might indicate that the types of droughts the newer varieties were designed for are somehow different than the type of droughts they were exposed to in this experiment. In particular, as we’ve discussed in prior posts, 2012 was a drought characterized by very high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits, the kind of droughts that one expects more of with climate change.

2012, in other words, was not just a dry drought but a hot drought. The other study David looks at compares the two kinds of drought.

What’s really interesting is how remarkably low the correlation between performance in “drought” and “drought+heat” is (0.08).

While not reading too much into either study, Lobell cautions that very hot droughts may require different kinds of varieties from mere dry droughts.