I won’t beat around the (tea) bush. CIAT’s work on what will happen to the suitability for tea of the areas where the crop is currently grown in Kenya was kinda worrying. Tea is the mother-in-law’s main source of income. No need to fret, however. I gave the lat/longs of the MIL’s spread to our friends at CIAT (it’s the little blue dot at the bottom of the map) and when they ran it through their Maxent models it turns out that the “good” tea suitability of today (yellow on the map) will increase to “very good” by 2020 (green) and even beyond that by 2050. Phew! Many thanks to Anton and Andy at CIAT for saving me some sleepless nights. Perhaps you can do China next?
The spread of agriculture in print
Three ahead-of-print papers on the spread of agriculture in Current Anthropology:
- The Neolithic Southwest Asian Founder Crops — Ehud Weiss, Daniel Zohary
- Westward Ho! — Peter Rowley-Conwy (that would be about Europe)
- Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals — Peter Bellwood
Things are hectic at the moment, so the penetrating summary and free-wheeling synthesis you’ve come to expect will have to wait. Unless of course you want to do them. The papers are free to access, after all…
European agrobiodiversity and biodiversity strategies
Participatory research and on-farm management of agricultural biodiversity in Europe, by Michel Pimbert, looks like an interesting read. So, in a different way, does the EU biodiversity strategy to 2020. What is not so great is that, at first sight, there doesn’t seem to be much of the former in the latter. But let me get back to you when I’ve gone through both in more detail.
Yes! We do have bananas
Almost a week ago we reported on the fabulous news that bananas, and especially the threat posed by a virulent new race of Fusarium wilt (better known as Panama disease) 1 had featured on BBC’s The One Show. That show, alas, is not available outside the UK without some very fancy jiggery pokery, which hoops everyone who wanted to see it would have had to jump through for themselves. 2 So, in a spirit of sharing and collective action for agrobiodiversity, we assembled a crack team of hoop-jumpers and did the jiggery pokery for you.
Here you go: Restaurant critic and all around good guy Jay Rayner comes to grips with the threat to bananas, aided and abetted by Pat Heslop Harrison, whose blog post on the subject we refer you to once again, just in case you want more on the topic than The One Show offered.
Was it worth it? Of course it was.
Private cabbages go public in North Carolina
Of course the obligatory conspiracy theories have surfaced, but Monsanto’s gift of its extensive cabbage germplasm collection to North Carolina’s State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute seems genuine enough.
“Monsanto is pleased to contribute cabbage germplasm to N.C. State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute at the N.C. Research Campus,” said Consuelo Madere, Monsanto’s Global Vegetable and Asia Commercial lead. “We sell cabbage seed under our Seminis brand in several world areas,” she said, “and we are delighted that the Institute will be working at NCRC to develop cabbage varieties well suited to the local production needs in North Carolina. It’s a great example of public and private efforts coming together at the campus.”
That might suggest that Monsanto would look askance at the material getting too far beyond North Carolina, but Dr Allan Brown, the breeder with the Plants for Human Health Institute who will be managing the collection, assures me there are no strings attached with regard to availability. He has a long job ahead checking on the viability of all the accessions, and regenerating and multiplying the material as needed, but he sees no impediment to it eventually being widely available, though he cannot put a date on that.
That’s good news for cabbage breeders around the world. If I were a proper reporter I would ask Monsanto why they didn’t make the donation to the USDA’s Northeast Regional PI Station at Geneva, New York, which manages plenty of cabbages, and which would then very willingly have made the material available to NCSU, and everyone else to boot. Maybe I will anyway.