Posts

Posted on

Important Plant Areas documented

More than 200 areas across North Africa and the Middle East have been identified as wild plant hotspots, a report has revealed. The research lists 207 places which are internationally important for the plants they contain, including 33 in Syria, 20 in Lebanon, 20 in Egypt, 21 in Algeria, 13 in Tunisia and five in Libya.

The report in question is “Important Plant Areas of the south and east Mediterranean region,” 1 just out thanks to IUCN, Plantlife International and WWF, and downloadable for free. The maps are nice, of course, and I hope they’ll be available in digital form in due course, if they are not already. 2 And it is also great to see a list of species with restricted ranges; it includes quite a few crop wild relatives, in particular Allium and Vicia spp.

Posted on

Ethiopian Agriculture Portal misplaces crop diversity

The Ethiopian Agriculture Portal (EAP) is a gateway to agricultural information relevant to development of Ethiopian agriculture. EAP makes access to information easier because it uses a simple, logically laid-out web interface from which users can access documents on agricultural commodities important to Ethiopia. The collection includes many documents in local languages mainly Amharic…

The intended audiences of the portal are all those engaged in public or private agricultural development endeavors in Ethiopia; including extension, research, higher education, private sector, and other government and non-government stakeholders. In short, it serves national and international entities interested in Ethiopian agriculture as partners in trade, investment, or development.

A very worthy effort, and not badly done. But one is sorry not to see any mention of the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation in Addis Ababa, with it’s storied genebank housing a unique collection of local crop germplasm. And although it is welcome to see, under “Other Resources”, reference to the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System and the Domestic Animal Genetic Resources Information System, one longs for similar exposure for international databases on plant genetic resources, in particular those of the CGIAR Centres, whose data is of course also now available through Genesys.

Posted on

Causation sought between seed banks and vitamin D deficiency

Google has a new thing where you put in a search term and it tells you what other terms showed a similar pattern of search over time since 2004, at least in the US. So of course I played around with it for way too long, but pretty much nothing of interest turned up. Except for one, strange thing. It seems that the time pattern shown by searching for the term “seed bank” is very highly correlated with a number of permutations of the search for “vitamin D deficiency.” Any idea why that should be?

Posted on

Using ancient grains to remap perceptions of Central Asia

The Silk Road Symposium held at the Penn Museum in March 2011 was clearly quite a get-together, judging by the personalities involved. Some of the presentations are on Youtube, including one by Dr Michael Frachetti on “Seeds for the Soul: East/West Diffusion of Domesticated Grains,” which has been picked up and discussed by Dienekes on his blog. It’s really worth listening to the whole talk, even at 45 minutes, but in case you don’t have the time, here are the main points.

Dr Frachetti excavated at a place called Begash in Uzbekistan. This is a site which goes back to at least 2500 BC and was used by nomadic pastoralists for many centuries. The dig came up with the earliest evidence of wheat and broomcorn millet in Inner Asia, dating back to about 2200 BC. At left is what the seeds they found look like (click to enlarge).

But here’s the thing. There’s no evidence that the people living at Begash at the time actually ate these things. 3 Their teeth just don’t look like the teeth of people who have a lot of cereals in their diet. Basically, no cavities. And there was no evidence of processing either. So what was happening?

The seeds were recovered from a very particular context — a cremation burial. And only in that context. Along, incidentally, with horse remains. Both the cereals and horses were in fact ritual commodities, the excavators think. Not stuff to be consumed every day, but rather exotic commodities to be wheeled out on very special occasions to make an impression. As Dienekes points out, using wheat for funerary offerings goes on still.

Where did the cereals come from? To cut a long story short, the wheat from the west and the Panicum millet from the east. 4 Which is the reason why Dr Frachetti thinks we need to remap our thinking about Central Asia. It’s not so much that the people who inhabited these regions were peripheral to the great Bronze Age civilizations, but rather (or, perhaps, also) that they were the link between them.

Posted on

The 8th annual Great Lakes Indigenous Farming Conference passes us by

…Caroline [Chartrand] and about 100 other indigenous farmers and gardeners—along with students and community members—gathered in March on the White Earth reservation in Northern Minnesota to share knowledge, stories, and, of course, seeds.

Don’t know how we missed this from yes! magazine a couple of weeks back. In particular as one of the stories was about Pawnee corn, a topic we have covered here a number of times.