Posts

Posted on

Overlooking agricultural biodiversity again

I’m afraid I’m going to be a nay-sayer again. Here’s a quote from an otherwise very worthy piece on the Gates Foundation website trying to link what’s happening at the G20 and in the CGIAR reform process and other high-level stuff with the needs of “35 year old Oumou, who lives in Sadore village in Niger, struggling to feed her 5 children due to unpredictable harvests from her husband’s millet farm.” 1

…Oumou’s group could plant hardy Apple of the Sahel (10 times the vitamin C of ordinary apples and rich in calcium, iron, and phosphorus) and Moringa trees (whose leaves contain 4 times the vitamin A in carrots, 4 times the calcium and double the protein in milk, and 3 times the potassium in bananas).

I don’t have much of a problem with the use of a vernacular name for Ziziphus in such a piece. You might ask why use Moringa then, but that seems to have become widely accepted as the common name for Moringa oleifera. What I do have a little problem with is comparing its vitamin C content with apples, a crop that is of no relevance to the Sahel. But that’s a rhetorical flourish on the part of the writer, I guess. Apple of the Sahel vs ordinary apple. Geddit? Let’s let that pass.

I personally think “10 times the vitamin C of ordinary apples” is borderline misleading, even if it were a useful comparison, though that is excusable too. Quick googling gave a range of 44-133 mg/100g pulp for a few “ber” varieties and 7-40 mg/100g pulp for a few apple varieties. So the range of ratios is about 1-20, so let’s call it 10 on average. Fine. But who cares about averages? In a piece about how research can help the Sahelian smallholder, why not grasp with both hands the opportunity of at least pointing out that Oumou could be helped to identify the most nutritious varieties? Dropping the agrobiodiversity ball — no, that’s not it: not even recognizing it as a ball — is what I find it hard to forgive.

Posted on

Bringing together researchers and breeders

It all started with a bravura Annals of Botany blog post from Pat Heslop Harrison from a scientific conference in Assisi: “Italian Genetics Societies in Assisi: staple foods and orphan crops via epigenomics and systems biology.”

That got posted to Facebook, where I commented on it by extracting what I found a particularly trenchant sentence:

I failed to notice substantial contributions to discussions or presentations from breeders or seed organizations, the end users of so much of the research discussed.

There were more comments in other media, apparently, and Pat felt the need to follow up. He’s done that both on his blog and on Facebook. And what he says is, again, well worth reading in full. Here’s a taster:

Unfortunately the difficulty making links of researchers with the seed companies and breeders is found in almost all of Europe, perhaps with the exception of the Netherlands.

There are other exceptions around the world:

India is brilliant in doing these things, with farmers’ cooperatives, tissue culture/propagation companies, extension workers (running trials etc), always at the meetings and willing to show you their lines, approaches, and discuss applications of what you say (see, for example, my blog from last year). USA is different with the land-grant universities taking research all the way to finished varieties.

And Africa? Anyway, I’d really like to know that the breeders think, so I’ve sent the various links to GIPB. But I can see that centralizing this discussion may prove tricky. Share fair, anyone? Well, maybe.

Posted on

Money for shiny new rope?

You might think that when Africa’s “most important, but neglected native crops” get $40 million of support we would be all over the story like a rash. So why weren’t we? 2 Mostly it is because it is really hard to find anything positive to say, and we don’t want to sound like nay-sayers.

The gist of the “commitment” Improving Africa’s Neglected Food Crops, which the Clinton Global Initiative ascribes to NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, 3 is that private companies and public bodies have teamed up to build, among other things, a biotechnology centre in Ghana. According to UC Davis, the centre:

[W]ill sequence the genome — an organism’s entire collection of genes — for each species and make that information freely available to scientists around the world. That information will then be applied, using the most advanced breeding techniques and technologies, to develop new varieties of crops that are more nutritious, produce higher yields and are more tolerant of environmental stresses, such as drought.

The proposed centre may even be the same one referred to in a SciDev.net piece, although that one “will focus research on cassava, cocoyam, sweet potato and yam”.

Either way, I have to ask whether complete genome sequences are what poor African farmers really need right now. I realize that genomes are groovy, and very scientific, and will undoubtedly deliver great improvements in five years. Right now, though, here’s a small idea of what actual smallholder farmers want. Yesterday morning — I promise — Nduse Mailu left this comment to a post from March 2007:

i stumbled on this blog abd it seems quite awesome to a farmer like me.i currently have about 500 trees and i am in the process of increasing to 4000 and i am seeking guidance on whether to continue growing kienyenji style that is planting seeds from my own fruits or profesionaly that is buying guide me please and to Victor how are your trees doing what are ur challenges if any?

As it happens, the announcement of the new project singles out a tree for special mention.

[T]he consortium has already begun to sequence the (sic) Faidherbia albida, a type of acacia tree that can be used for improving soil nitrogen content and preventing erosion. The tree also has edible seeds and, unlike most trees, sheds its leaves during the rainy season so that it can be grown among field crops without shading them.

Right now, then, what do you suppose Mr Mailu needs? The sequence of Faidherbia albida (aka African winterthorn) with a promise of great improvements to come? Or a reliable supply of seedlings of good enough provenance and the knowledge to get the most out of them? 4

I have no desire to stop Ghana and the rest of Africa developing the skills to sequence whatever they want, although I do question the cost effectiveness of doing the sequencing that way. But why is it even possible to talk of raising $40 million for that when farmers like Mr Mailu are posting comments here looking for very simple advice?

Here’s one possible reason.

“In order to really solve problems, and to get people to join, you have to break them down to their most transparent and simple pieces.”

So says Rajiv Shah, “the young gun fixing USAID” in an interview he gave Fortune magazine. And that idea — simplify, simplify, simplify — Shah got from his mentor Bill Gates, who said:

“The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.”

Uh-huh.

Now, you can take two approaches to the kind of complexity that faces Mr Mailu and millions like him. You could say that providing comprehensive extension services to millions of poor farmers is impossibly complex because the farmers all live in different places and have different farming systems and need different advice. How much simpler to sequence orphan crops.

Or you could say that sequencing orphan crops is unutterably complex, because each crop is likely to be different and to require different tweaks to its genome to enhance its performance in different places, and in the end you’re going to need massive investments in extension services to get the improved crops out to the farmers and ensure that they know how to make good use of them. How much simpler to offer farmers good practical advice now.

How complex is that?

Posted on

Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair off and running

The Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair will be an exciting and “out-of-the-box” event, offering participants creative and innovative learning and sharing opportunities, and equipping them with tools to better influence future rural development activities.

Here’s the homepage, with all the various ways of following developments. Though the live video feed is elsewhere. I just got this quote from Rob Burnet, who was talking about sharing the joys of chicken-rearing:

Information should be in a format such that when you hold your hand out, it’s snatched!

Snatch away.

LATER: IFAD lists the highlights. Interestingly, Sam Dryden‘s presentation yesterday of the Gates Foundation agricultural strategy doesn’t make the cut. Video to come, apparently. But here’s a summary, on page 2.

Posted on

Featured: Feed databases

Alan Duncan of ILRI responds to Luigi’s “could do better” on a database of forage in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are various “nifty ILRI tools” in development and I’m not sure that the SSA feeds database is the right one for what you’re suggesting. … The key issue is choosing technologies that deal with the major constraints: feed scarcity, feed quality and feed seasonality. And it’s also about much more than nutritive value – there are many other characteristics of feed technologies which will affect their suitability in different contexts. We do envisage a suit of tools to deal with some of these issues and will keep posting progress on the fodder adoption blog.

Good to know.