It can be a bit frustrating banging on about the importance of agricultural biodiversity when almost everybody else seems to be focused on simplistic solutions to complex problems. Frustrating, and tiring. So I’ll just point you to two items you can read for yourself and decide whether we are truly nuts. First, Nature’s report from Yunnan in China about the drought there. Secondly, a paper by Professor Yy Zhu and his colleagues, Crop Diversity for Yield Increase. Anyone should be able to join the dots.
GM research: is there no alternative?
Some strange juxtapositions lately. On the one hand, we have Bruce Stutz writing in the Yale Environment 360 that private companies working on GM crops remain reluctant to allow independent research on their products. On the other we have Pamela Ronald and a colleague opposite the editorial page of the New York Times, saying that we need lots more GM, preferably in the public domain.
I don’t know enough about the intrigues around independent research to say more than that it seems pretty rum that scientists can’t get their hands on the stuff they need to assess GM crops for themselves, as opposed to for the manufacturers. Pamela Ronald’s arguments are, however, a lot more filling. And a lot less convincing. For example, she talks about engineering sorghum resistant to drought and to the parasitic weed Striga. Before we worry too much about drought-resistant sorghum, though, might it not be a good idea to just help farmers move from their very thirsty maize crops to the altogether more frugal sorghum? And is there really a need to engineer Striga resistance when a locally proven simpler technology already works perfectly well and tackles more than one pest, in more than one crop? It isn’t glamorous. But it works. Now. Not at some unspecified time in the future. Golden rice puts in an obligatory appearance, and there are cameo walk-ons for high-protein potatoes and high zinc sorghum. In other words, the usual suspects.
What is novel is that Ronald, who engineered flood resistance into rice, and her co-author James E. McWilliams, devote most of their space to the papaya engineered to resist ringspot virus, which saved the papaya industry on Hawaii. They say that:
The real significance of the papaya recovery is not that genetic engineering was the most appropriate technology delivered at the right time, but rather that the resistant papaya was introduced before the backlash against engineered crops intensified.
I don’t think that is its real significance at all. I think its real significance is that it shows what a dedicated individual researcher — Dennis Gonsalves — can do when not working for The Man. I know this not from Gonsalves himself, but from a blogger’s write up of a talk Gonsalves gave, which we nibbled here a couple of weeks back. There are some interesting insights there into the differences between public and private research, which is why I found this paragraph from Ronald and McWilliams so interesting:
As it now stands, opposition to genetic engineering has driven the technology further into the hands of a few seed companies that can afford it, further encouraging their monopolistic tendencies while leaving it out of reach for those that want to use it for crops with low (or no) profit margins.
That really is one of those nice counterfactual propositions. Why is it out of reach? Because of the cost of regulation? In which case, could it be that the cry of the private companies against the time and cost of regulation is really crocodile tears? Maybe it really suits them, because only they have sufficiently deep pockets. I wonder whether public opinion would be more favourably disposed to genetically engineered crops if they were produced as public goods, to be distributed at cost to the deserving poor? Is it just profit that makes GM crops unacceptable, no matter what people might say about health or the environment?
Papaya ringspot resistance might be OK, because there is no alternative. But for “problems” where we already have perfectly good solutions, I don’t believe it matters whether that research is in private or public hands. The pure financial cost is too high, especially when we haven’t invested enough in the alternatives.
A market in agrobiodiversity conservation credits?
So apparently Caroline Spelman, the new UK Secretary of State for environment, food and rural affairs, will be considering “a new system of conservation credits to protect habitats,” in line with a manifesto promise.
Under the scheme proposed in the manifesto, any property development that results in biodiversity loss must compensate for that loss by an equal investment in biodiversity and habitat conservation or restoration elsewhere.
Or so says a generally favourable commentary in The Guardian by Ben Caldecott, head of UK & EU climate change and energy policy at Climate Change Capital (CCC), who actually thinks the whole thing should go global. Worth a try, why not? But will the scheme include agrobiodiversity? If the said property development, or whatever, resulted in loss of genetic diversity in crop landraces or local livestock breeds, would it likewise be brought to book? It would be nice, though perhaps naive, to think that it would.
Spatially explicit conservation
The May 2010 Diversity and Distributions is a special issue on “Conservation biogeography — foundations, concepts and challenges.” I haven’t had a chance to go through it all, but there are very interesting-looking contributions on how to improve niche model, the role of citizen science and the biogeography of climate change. More when I actually read a couple of the papers.
Mango madness
What is it with mangoes? One glorious post about the mother of all mangoes and suddenly they’re everywhere. Case in point. Visiting friends kindly brought me a jar of mango chutney. Fair enough, and much appreciated. But look closely at the label.
How many shoppers at Sainsbury are even aware that there are different varieties of mango? And do they, like me, rush to the interwebs to discover, for example, that Malda comes from around Malda in West Bengal, and that just last week there were further reports of urban development cutting into Malda mango plantations in Digha.? Search for Totapuri mango, by contrast, and you get lots of listings of people who want to sell you processed pulp. 1 I’m betting, then, that Sainsbury’s finest is mostly Totapuri with a smidgen of Malda thrown in. But I’m willing to be corrected. Not that there’s much real estate left on the label to do so.