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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.

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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.

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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.

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Featured: Wellesbourne cliffhanger

Andrew has a question for the U. of Warwick, and will be writing a strongly worded letter to Britain’s new Prime Minister if he doesn’t get the right answer:

Is the Genetic Resources Unit to be rehoused under the Department of Life Sciences in a new state of the art facility to increase storage capacity to meet the increasing demand to ex situ conserved plant genetic resources (crops, landraces, wild crop relatives) or are seeds and germplasm to be dumped in the department’s basement with little care for its socio-economic and money making value with the addition to jobs being axed in a research area, which struggles to find adequate funding?