Posts

Posted on

International collections can’t do it by themselves

Two international centres tout their germplasm collections today. AVRDC’s newsletter, which I just got by email but can’t find on their website, gives a bit of a history lesson:

When AVRDC was founded in 1971, the Center started off with a modest collection of 570 accessions. By 1995, the genebank had grown to 43,205 accessions, comprising 63 genera and 209 species. To date, the Center has accumulated 57,230 accessions comprising 168 genera, 420 species from 154 countries of origin, a growth of 32.5% in number of accessions, 166.7% in number of genera, and 101% in number of species. AVRDC’s vegetable germplasm collections, held as an international public good for the world community, are growing in genetic diversity.

A further snippet of information shows yet again how interconnected the world is for genetic resources. Although “AVRDC is the largest holder of tomato germplasm,” it only includes “9% of the 83,680 accessions held worldwide.”

The same point is made, not quite so directly, but in a more visually striking way, in a map just out in Rice Today (click to enlarge):

And that, dear reader, is why we need a global system, and not just ever more genebanks.

Posted on

Is nutrition research any use without genetics & genomics?

That’s the question Keith Grimaldi of the Eurogene project asks in the latest post on his newish blog. By “genetics” he means human genetics.

His answer?

Without genetics & nutrigenomics, epidemiological nutritional research will remain “mostly harmless”. Or to paraphrase a less amusing person maybe it’s like trying to govern the Italians — “not difficult, just a waste of time”

We’ve suggested something similar here a couple of times, albeit it much less eloquently than Dr Grimaldi. Are the people designing projects aiming to improve the nutritional status of communities, whether based on biofortification through genetic modification or diversity-based approaches, listening?

Posted on

Prota4U: stopped making sense.

I’ve only lately begun to sip from the firehose that is Twitter. Many things about it puzzle me, but not unduly. One thing I do find odd is the feed called Prota4U. It’s an arm of The Prota Foundation, and Prota stands for Plant Resources of Tropical Africa. The Foundation’s aims are entirely laudable:

It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information through Webdatabases, Books, CD-Rom’s and Special Products. … The objectives are to bring the published information, now accessible to the resourceful happy few, into the public domain. This will contribute to greater awareness and sustained use of the ‘world heritage of African useful plants’, with due respect for traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights.

One could quibble with the details, but the overall idea is sound. Prota4U — groovy to the nth degree — publishes an endless stream of tweets, roughly one every three minutes while it is awake, that don’t link to anything, often don’t say much, and frequently have nothing to do with useful plants of Tropical Africa. This particular rant was occasioned by this tweet:

Avena sativa — It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour.

Fascinating. Just the thing to nibble on with my breakfast oats. But so what? And the tweet doesn’t go anywhere either. Annoyed, I Googled that descriptive phrase. And found it in two places. One, Plants for a Future’s database entry for Avena ludoviciana. The other, this tweet from Prota4U:

Avena byzantina – It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour.

That too goes nowhere.

Of course in the greater scheme of things what Prota does with its information is no concern of mine, and I could simply stop following. I’m just totally puzzled by what it thinks it is doing. Someone, anyone, put me out of my misery, please.

Posted on

Research on Ethiopian food insecurity not very joined up?

The Drylands Coordination Group (DCG) is a network for capacity building through exchange of practical experience and appropriate knowledge on food security in the drylands of Africa.

And a huge amount of very detailed research they are doing too, in Mali, Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia. But one does have to wonder how much “exchange of practical experience” is really taking place. Take two reasonably recent reports from Ethiopia.

One, entitled “The Levels, Determinants and Coping Mechanisms of Food Insecure Households in Southern Ethiopia” (published Feb. 2009) makes no mention of diversity within crops at all. In fact, it even conflates crops, by measuring household economic status as the “average amount of wheat per person (all household production converted into wheat term).” Surely it makes a difference to the “levels, determinants and coping mechanisms of food insecure households” whether they are producing only one variety of wheat, several varieties of wheat, or both wheat and other cereals.

Compare that with another DCG study, entitled “Seed system impact on farmers’ income and crop biodiversity in the drylands of southern Tigray” (published Jan. 2009). This goes into great detail on the different varieties of each of the cereal crops in the study area.

Surely the two teams could have talked?