Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Nourishing the Planet continues to disseminate answers. Today, Pascal Pulvery, of the National Association of Livestock & Artificial Insemination Cooperatives, France says:
“I think that the majority of funds should be used to develop the production of food for local utilization instead of developing the agricultural production for exportation.”
In other news, there’s a National Association of Livestock & Artificial Insemination Cooperatives in France.
The pack is well and truly on the scent now, with The Guardian in London and ABC in Australia weighing in, to say nothing of assorted ad-farms and feed scrapers. As they do so, strange claims are being made.
That Pavlovsk is “the world’s first global seed bank,” for example. It isn’t. But that does not diminish its importance of the Russian state’s short-sightenedness one bit.
And that “[t]welve Russian scientists starved to death at the site while protecting the crops”. They didn’t. They starved to death at the VIR’s headquarters in Leningrad proper.
Nits being picked, I agree, just as I’ve previously picked the “seed bank” nits. The heroism of the past is important and should never be forgotten, but it detracts from the argument that collections like Pavlovsk are even more important for the future. The forest fires raging in Russia during the hottest summer on record by far will burn themselves out. The need to adapt food and farming systems to climate change, using the genetic diversity of places like Pavlovsk, will not.
Every day Nourishing the Planet, a blog at the Worldwatch Institute, will publish three answers to the question Where Would You Like to See More Agricultural Funding Directed? You can email a response, or tweet it, but I’ll just say something here.
For me, the biggest single problem about current mainstream agricultural funding for development is that it is all chasing the same unimaginative goals. Adding another USD$300 million a year to the pot is a wonderful thing, but it is like more water pouring down a gully. It deepens the channel but makes it even more difficult to jump out of that channel and find another path. Given how little is currently spent on the more effective use of agricultural biodiversity, I reckon just a tenth of that, say USD30 million, would make a huge difference to the ability of people to enjoy a food secure future. Throw in another USD30 million for extension services, and I reckon you could really see some impact. Don’t get me wrong; things like infrastructure are important too. But in the end, lots of people are doing that. Let’s see a little money devoted to trying something different.
What do you think? If you send a suggestion to Nourishing the Planet, why not copy it here too?
Something slightly different. Comments continue to arrive in support of a proposal to resurrect the Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter as an online journal. Among them:
It was a very important publication.
A very helpful means to share information.
An important source of information to genebank personnel and beyond.
Things are moving along. However, we’re pretty sure further support would be welcomed, so if you haven’t already, consider leaving a comment on either the original post or Robert Koebner’s update.
Absolutely nothing material has changed in the circumstances surrounding the possible destruction of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, which we first blogged about in April. The hearing date — when courts will decide whether the land should be bulldozed to make way for private houses, destroying the world’s largest genebank of fruits and berries — has come closer, of course. It is scheduled for 11 August, next Wednesday. And this morning the Global Crop Diversity Trust put out a new press release highlighting the imminent court case and adding to its public campaign to persuade the Russian Bear that berries are better than bungalows.
So, naturally, Pavlovsk is now in the news, for The Economist blogs, the BBC, Agence France Press, the NYT blogs, Bioversity International and bits of the blogosphere.
My absolute favourite bit of the stories is this quote from the Trust’s Press Release:
In a bit of Kafkaesque logic, the property developers maintain that because it contains a “priceless collection,” no monetary value can be assigned to Pavlovsk Station, so, therefore, it is essentially worthless. Furthermore, the Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate Development has argued that the collection was never officially registered and thus it does not officially exist.
Against this level of sophistry, what hope can mere letters, tweets and petition signatures have? Having said which, it would be nice to pleasantly surprised on Wednesday, or shortly thereafter. 1
The BBC’s story echoes a point made by Sergey Alexanian of the Vavilov Institute, that as the land is for sale, one way to save the collection would be for the Vavilov Institute to simply buy the sites.
“It’s a huge amount of money,” [Alexanian] said. “Right now, it’s not the best time for the Russian science, financially speaking, so buying it would be ideal – but it’s impossible.”
How about one of those newly-minted philanthrocapitalists making the impossible possible?
One final point. Many people out there are referring to Pavlovsk as a seed bank. This is not quite the whole truth. It is a field genebank, in which almost all the varieties are stored as living plants in the ground. This is necessary because most of the varieties do not breed true from seed. So the only way to maintain the varieties is as plants. Seeds would store the entire genetic diversity of the population, it is true, and could be easily moved, but seeds cannot be used to regenerate the specific package of associated genes that makes up a variety. It is those varieties that have been studied and characterized over the decades at Pavlovsk. It is the studies and the varieties to which they are attached that make the collection so important.