Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The genebank of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa is 40 years old. There’s an online celebration tomorrow. See you there.
Oh, and probably coincidentally, you can read about ILRI’s forage work in Somalia in the latest newsletter from the Seed Systems Group.
Great to see a couple of my former bosses recognized for their exceptional contributions to the conservation of crop diversity.
I like this quote from Geoff:
This is really a chance to get that message out and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we’re going to be able to feed the world in 50 years.
The paper “Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate” by Maarten van Zonneveld, Roeland Kindt, Stepha McMullin, Enoch G. Achigan-Dako, Sognigbé N’Danikou, Wei-hsun Hsieh, Yann-rong Lin, and Ian K. Dawson has won the PNAS 2023 Cozzarelli Prize for the best paper of the year in Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Here’s the abstract:
As the climate changes, major staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa becomes increasingly vulnerable. Underutilized traditional food plants offer opportunities for diversifying cropping systems. In this study, the authors used climate niche modeling to assess the potential of 138 traditional food plants to diversify or replace staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa by 2070. The authors report that staple crops may no longer be able to grow at approximately 10% of locations by 2070. Further, the authors identified 58 traditional crops that provide complementary micronutrient contents suitable for integration into staple cropping systems under current and projected climatic conditions. The results suggest that diversifying sub-Saharan African food production with underutilized crops could improve climate resilience and dietary health.
And here’s a video explaining the results:
Benjamin Nowak, a “French lecturer in agronomy with teaching and research activities focused on soil sciences and remote sensing for crop monitoring,” has a nice infographic showing “what a large farm would look like, growing all the world’s crops.” Pretty cool. But where’s all the ganja?
A high-resolution version is available.
