Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
“With more than 12 years of experience working with camelina, exclusive access to the majority of the world’s camelina germplasm, and a wealth of intellectual property around the genetic modification of the crop, we have chosen to focus our company’s efforts on camelina’s use as a sustainable, next generation biofuel.”
Well, I’m convinced.
The BBC has a nice slide show on the Earthwatch Institute’s medicinal plants project with a Samburu community in Kenya.
We were kind of sorry this morning, taking a glance at the IFPRI website this morning, to see our worst fears about the collapse of agricultural extension systems confirmed.
Of course it’s a cheap shot, but what’s the point of owning and operating a global web publishing empire if you can’t take the odd cheap shot?
Most crop geneticists agree that enrichment of the cultivated gene pool will be necessary to meet the challenges that lie ahead. However, to fully capitalize on the extensive reservoir of favorable alleles within wild germplasm, many advances are still needed. These include increasing our understanding of the molecular basis for key traits, expanding the phenotyping and genotyping of germplasm collections, improving our molecular understanding of recombination in order to enhance rates of introgression of alien chromosome regions, and developing new breeding strategies that permit introgression of multiple traits. Recent progress has shown that each of these challenges is tractable and within reach if some of the basic problems limiting the application of new technologies can be tackled.
That’s from Breeding Technologies to Increase Crop Production in a Changing World, part of the recent Science special feature on food security. Sure, the challenges of use are tractable. But what if those germplasm collections are inadequate in their coverage, accessibility, management or funding? As ever, genebanks are pretty much taken for granted in these sorts of discussions.
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since CIAT’s ace snapper Neil Palmer posted his great shots of guinea pigs in the Congo some months back. Finally, it has, with a long post about CIAT’s project More chicken and pork in the pot, and money in the pocket: improving forages for monogastric animals with low-income farmers. You’ll notice at once that guinea pigs are neither pork nor chicken. 1 In fact, they weren’t in the original project at all. But they were in the project’s target area.
Small and easy to conceal, guinea pigs are well-suited to DRC’s conflict zones, where extreme poverty and widespread lawlessness means that the looting of larger domestic livestock is commonplace. …
“We’re not sure exactly how guinea pigs got to DRC,” said CIAT forage scientist Brigitte Maass, “but they have enormous potential to improve rural livelihoods there.”
The post goes on to explain just how guinea pigs work well in the Congo to offer people a measure of food security, and how the project scientists intend to improve that still further. Nice to be able to embrace something new midstream.
“None of the scientists had contemplated guinea pigs as an option in DRC when the project started. Now they really could turn out to be indispensable.”