Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Cary waxes lyrical on the origins of agriculture:
We who love diversity and love agricultural history should revel in the complexity of the subject. Smith’s profound and insightful work adds so much. I only wish more of us appreciated it. If more did, imagine how differently we in the genetic resources community might see the world. It would, actually, change the world.
While our sympathy goes out to the residents and tourists on Madeira, who have had to cope with the worst storms since 1993, we are pleased to have had some goodish news from our friend Eliseu Bettencourt. He managed to speak to colleagues at the CEM-UMa (Centre for Macaronesian Studies – University of Madeira) and was assured that colleagues and the ISOPlexis Genebank were OK, despite the terrible floods on Saturday 20 February. “The only thing that happened to the Genebank was a power cut for a few hours,” and that had no effect on the normal functioning of the cold rooms.
That is good news for the genebank and its staff. I wonder, though: is there a safety duplicate of the ISOPlexis collection at Svalbard, or anywhere else?
No answers: we just don’t know. But Bruce Smith, whose book on The Emergence of Agriculture remains one of the best, recently told an audience at Harvard University that although most people see domestication as “a before-and-after kind of event, with hunter-gatherers before and farmers afterward. The reality … was likely far more complex.”
Hard to argue with that, especially in light of increasing evidence that people were both altering the environment to favour wild food sources and cultivating plants without domesticating them. Smith talked a bit about which plants were domesticated — “early-succession species that did well in disturbed environments that humans could create for them” — but not, at least according to the reports, about whether there’s any scope for additional domestications. We’ve asked before: are there any species that people should be cultivating, and possibly domesticating, now that they have so far ignored? My own contenders would be perennial grains. The plants are there; they just need a few thousands year’s work.
Smith’s lecture was part of a series called Food for Thought. 1 We missed one by my old mucker Richard Wrangham, of How Cooking Made Us Human, but tomorrow, 23 February, Samuel Myers will “discuss troubling trends, including climate change and increased threats from pests and pathogens that may constrain the world’s resources, requiring new approaches to sustainable agriculture.” I wonder whether agricultural biodiversity will feature. Someone go, and tell us.
Elizabeth’s experience of social networking and breeders suggests that they just want to exchange expertise:
If you ask them about the web site of their dreams, they rank high the ability to contact their peers on the web and be alerted whenever a new item is posted. They seek for exchange of expertise. So, sounds like a Ning type site or Facebook group could do it!
Well, what are they waiting for?
Two stories of collaborative crop improvement — past, present and future — and the genebanks that underpin it to end the week with.
From an IRRI press release out today on IRRI’s collaboration with the Philippines:
Filipino farmers have adopted more than 75 IRRI-bred high-yielding rice varieties since 1960, have greatly improved their fertilizer and pest management strategies, and are implementing water-saving technologies.
It is telling that a particular point is made of the Filipino material in the IRRI genebank.
…in the International Rice Genebank housed at IRRI, 4,670 rice samples from the Philippines are conserved, including 4,070 traditional varieties, 485 modern varieties, and 115 wild relatives — all are available to share with Filipino farmers and scientists.
And from USDA’s Agricultural Research magazine, Feb. 2010 edition:
Of 1,768 heirloom wheats submitted since 2005, only 78 (or 4.4 percent) showed resistance to Ug99 at the Njoro site. Still, the prescreening led to identification of more Ug99-resistant wheat accessions than would’ve been achieved from sending randomly selected accessions for testing, says Bonman. This is evidenced by the fact that 7 percent of wheat lines resistant to U.S. races showed rust resistance in Kenya, yet only 1 percent of randomly selected accessions did.
I’ll be travelling for the next couple of weeks and blogging may be sparse.