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Crop genebanks in the Global Biodiversity Outlook

Seed banks play an important role in conserving the diversity of plant species and crop varieties for future generations. Among the most ambitious programmes for ex situ conservation are the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, initiated by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and its partners worldwide, which now includes nearly 2 billion seeds from 30,000 wild plant species, mainly from drylands; and the complementary Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which has been constructed in Norway, close to the Arctic Circle, to provide the ultimate safety net against accidental loss of agricultural diversity in traditional gene banks. The vault has capacity to conserve 4.5 million crop seed samples.

That’s from the section on genetic diversity from the CBD/UNEP Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, just out (pp 51-53 of a large pdf). And very welcome it is too.

Some of it is not particularly well done, but one is surprised to see it done at all. It would have been nice to have had more examples of genetic erosion than this estimate for rice in China, for example:

…the number of local rice varieties being cultivated has declined from 46,000 in the 1950s to slightly more than 1,000 in 2006.

And what does this mean exactly? Who cultivates wild relatives of rice?

In some 60 to 70 per cent of the areas where wild relatives of rice used to grow, it is either no longer found or the area devoted to its cultivation has been greatly reduced.

Probably something has been lost in translation. On the positive side of the conservation ledger, there is the assertion that:

For some 200 to 300 crops, it is estimated that over 70% of genetic diversity is already conserved in gene banks, meeting the target set under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.

This figure is much quoted, but I’ve never fully understood how it was arrived at.

Anyway, as I say, at least crop diversity and its ex situ conservation is in there. And the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture gets a mention. We should be grateful for that.

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Featured: Livestock

Susan MacMillan adds more arrows to the quiver of dietary diversification:

Let’s not forget another important if traditional weapon in our arsenal — animal agriculture, which provides poor households with modest quantities of milk and meat, which help human bodies make better use of the staples they consume, as well as help farmers not only make regular incomes but also make more efficient, sustainable and productive use of their croplands and farming systems. Indeed, the oldest staple of all may be not grains but diversification itself.

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Beyond the staples

I haven’t been following the Millennium Villages literature — scientific and popular — quite as assiduously as I should, but what I have read does seem to focus quite strongly on the staple crops. No doubt a sustainable increase in the production of staples is necessary to combat hunger in Africa. But is it sufficient? The impression I have taken away from my reading is that that is not a question that is accorded high priority in this literature. If I’m wrong about this, I would welcome being set right. In any case, it came as a nice surprise to read the following passage in “Tripling crop yields in tropical Africa,” a recent article in Nature Geoscience by Prof. Pedro Sanchez, one of the moving forces behind the Millennium Villages project. 1

An increase in staple crop production is only a first step towards reducing hunger in tropical Africa. The provision of wider nutritional needs, such as more protein and adequate vitamins and trace elements, coupled with a reduction in disease, is also necessary.

Unfortunately that is not followed by a call to harness agrobiodiversity to provide those wider nutritional needs. But it does open an interesting door. A door that Bonnie McClafferty of HarvestPlus had no compunction about going through at SciDev.net a couple of days back:

The enormous challenge of micronutrient malnutrition is best addressed in the long run through poverty alleviation, economic development, education, women’s empowerment, access to adequate healthcare and dietary diversification, among other things.

Now, her defence of biofortification against the charge of medicalizing micronutrient deficiency sounds a lot like “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” which is a bit much, as in fact if anything it has been the good that’s been the enemy of the best in this game. Surely a lot more money has been going into biofortification than into dietary diversification — where, after all, is the latter’s equivalent of HarvestPlus? But it is good to see the importance of diverse diets — and by implication agrobiodiversity — at least recognized. Perhaps the Millennium Villages project could now plan some interventions around local vegetables and fruits?

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The Three-hundred-variety mango of Malihabad

Another reflection on a remarkable Indian mango tree from our friend Bhuwon Sthapit of Bioversity International.

It is hard to believe that a farmer can have as a hobby the grafting of multiple varietal scions of interesting and unique mango diversity on to a single tree. I certainly did not believe it. Until I saw the orchard of Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan in Malihabad. There he maintains several trees with many varieties grafted onto them as sources of scions for his mango nurseries. A good and reliable source of scions is essential to run a successful and credible mango nursery, but to have a conventional scion block is expensive in terms of maintenance and land.

The son of the magician grafter, Najmi, showed me two very remarkable mango trees. One is said to be 100 years old and is named Al-Muqarrar. It has had more than 300 varieties of mango skilfully grafted onto it by Najmi’s father father. The other, younger tree has more than 150 mango genotypes grafted on to it. Each branch looks like a different tree! Both trees are bearing fruits of different colour, shape and size, and at different times.

Born in 1945, Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan does not have any academic horticultural degrees, but he is widely renowned in India for his skills and knowledge in multiple grafting on a single tree. He was awarded the title of Udhyan Pandit (Professor of the Orchard) by a former President of India. He has also presented a mango tree bearing 54 varieties to the current President for the premises of the Mughal Garden of Rastrapati Bhavan. He has been acknowledged by many high-profile visitors from abroad and also decorated with the Padamashri award. His name is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records for his grafting feats.

Abdullah Nursery is famous in Malihabad and throughout India for Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan’s innovations, and markets saplings of commercial varieties to such distant places of Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Unlike government research stations, Haji Kaleem Ullaj Khan uses ground layering for his propagation for most commercial saplings, and veneer or wedge grafting in special cases. He has also grafted a guava tree that flowers and fruits all year round, which is another attraction for the nursery.

This innovation borne out of local need is a promising way for nurseries to maintain many scions at relatively low cost. However, this can be a high risk practice, because many varieties depend on one mother tree’s survival. It is thus important to have adequate safety duplication or maintain some scion material trees separately. Multiple variety grafting can also be used as an attraction in agrotourism, and for innovative marketing of diversity in urban and home gardens. This will create a new market for nursery growers and raise public interest in the diversity of mangoes. This activity has been conceptualized in the context of the UNEP/GEF project Conservation and Sustainable Use of Tropical Fruit Tree Diversity in India.

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Comments on Nibbles

Regular commenter Dirk Enneking suggests we rethink Nibbles:

Some sort of interaction with specific nibbles through a comment function could help your readers to turn your nibblings into a more interesting dia- or poly/multi-logue i.e. you’d get some reaction.

It’s an interesting idea. You can, of course, comment on any day’s worth of Nibbles, although I admit is isn’t obvious how. You have to go to the Nibbles Archive, by clicking on the link for All that condensed goodness in the sidebar on the right. Then you click on the Nibbles’ headline, and that brings up the complete entry with a comment form below. Cumbersome, I know, which is why we don’t get many comments on Nibbles and why Dirk’s idea is worth thinking about.

The thing is, Nibbles have been through many incarnations. To begin with, each Nibble was a separate post, which made them easy enough to comment on, but they got in the way of the main flow of longer posts. Then we moved them off into the sidebar, still as individual posts, but on a busy day older ones could easily disappear. Now we have a single post for Nibbles each day, but we still have it boxed off and separate. We could restore Nibbles to the main flow, and ensure that that post stays at the top of the content each day. Or we could rethink completely and go back to individual entries, one per Nibble.

I’m working on adding a Comment link directly to the boxed-off Nibbles, but in the meantime it would be interesting to know what you think. I’ve always thought that the place to comment on Nibbles it at the item they link to, but maybe that’s misguided. Lots of Nibbles end up on Twitter; maybe that’s the place for the conversation? Let us know, using the exceedingly simply Comment link below.