Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Ehsan reminds us of one of the complexities of genebanks charging for accessions:
Often genebanks holds collections arising from other countries from which the accession has been collected. Then, how ethical would it be for a country to request for materials collected from its country and have to pay for it. I think this is another point which should be taken in to consideration.
Lots of other comments, do have a look and add your own.
This post is not really about purple potatoes. It is, rather, a shameless attempt to connect with Adam Mars Jones, a well-known author. In the course of eviscerating Martin Amis, another well-known author, Mars Jones writes the following:
The same sense of lostness clings to social attitudes. When Des finds a girlfriend, Dawn, the only problem is her racist father, Horace. He’s not just a racist but a throwback of a racist: ‘Your brain’s smaller and a different shape. Whilst hers is normal, yours is closer to a primate’s.’ In the allotment of nasty social attitudes this contorted purple tuber must count as a heritage potato, miraculously re-established from a seed bank.
Which is enough to bring us up short. I’m not entirely sure what point Mars Jones is trying to make — contorted purple tubers being just the job under the right (marginal, high-altitude) circumstances — I do wonder what made him think of that particular metaphor, complete with interesting reference to “seed bank”.
So if you know the man himself, or know someone who might, do please ask and relay his answer.
We believe that implementation of a data-archiving policy by biodiversity and conservation journals would drive a large amount of species occurrence data across broad geographic and taxonomic ranges into biodiversity databases.
Uhm, something for the weekend, perhaps. Maybe even in conjunction with this. Or maybe I’ll just watch the football…
I know, I know, there’s been much more talk about market failure in the past couple of years than about market success. Case in point: a clever interactive map has been done showing you where markets have been bad for biodiversity, but not one showing where they’ve been good.
But all that negativity hasn’t stopped Dougal Thomson just launching a discussion on what the private sector can do for food security. It’s all to get you interested in The Economist’s Feeding the World conferences later this year of course. And to put you in an appropriately market-friendly mood for Rio +20 next week too, I suppose.
Anyway, here’s where, recession or no recession, you can channel your inner capitalist and tell the world how to “…reconcile a multinational’s need for profit with a smallholder’s need for income, a mother’s need to feed her baby and a nation’s need for food security.”
As Rio +20 looms ever nearer, everyone is scrambling to put stuff out pushing their particular agenda, taking care to note that they’re not suggesting that their agenda is any less vital than anyone else’s agenda, of course, and that in any case There Are No Silver Bullets. One of the more interesting products released to coincide with next week’s Brazilian festivities is an interactive map which uses “a new global trade database to follow the products implicated in species threats right through to the final consumers.”
The paper describing the methodology is in Nature.
We linked 25,000 Animalia species threat records from the IUCN Red List of endangered species to over 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries. We then used the trade database to evaluate over 5 billion supply chains in terms of their biodiversity impacts.
It’s a massive undertaking, and it may be churlish to wonders why it’s not easier to export the maps it enables one to produce. So I won’t, and merely confine myself to hoping that a plant version will be available soon. Oh, and maybe also one in which agriculture is not seen only as the bad guy. In fact, would it not be nice to have the other side of the coin? That is, a map showing where supply chains may actually be contributing to conservation. Come on, there must be a few examples of that! Bird-friendly coffee, anyone?