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UK to spend GBP15 million on food security

The UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRSC: does that name give you any clues about their priorities?) has committed GBP15 million “to establish training for food security research and development”. So, what’s involved?

  • “Transferring the UK’s world-leading bioscience research from the lab bench to the field will underpin this fast-growing sector.”
  • “The AgriSkills Forum recognises the need to address skills in the agri-food sector in a holistic manner and we look forward to working closely with BBSRC to compare notes and ensure that any potential synergies are encouraged to be realised.”
  • “Farming remains at the heart of tackling the challenge of feeding a world of nine billion people by 2050. What the farming industry needs in order to meet this challenge is strong agricultural and horticultural research in the UK. … This BBSRC scheme will help to ensure that research done by highly skilled scientists can benefit farmers by being translated into new technologies, practices and advice they can use on a commercial scale to produce more and impact less.”
  • “We need an increased number of individuals with specific very high level skills if we are to meet the challenge of future food security that has been laid out for us.”

I wonder what they’ll come up with for people who eat food. h/t Charles Spillane.

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Witnesses to agricultural adaptation


 I think we may have already blogged about WWF’s Climate Witness programme, and if not we should have. It’s a very “effective way to illustrate the impacts of climate change on real people in many different locations around the world, and the action they are taking to address the issues.” Several of the stories involve agriculture, of course. For example, Joseph Kones from Bomet in Kenya says that drought has been increasing in his area over the past 20 years, and that his farm is part of a pilot adaptation project involving tree planting and the building of terraces. It would be nice to extract all the agrobiodiversity-relevant examples of changes and adaptation to them. Perhaps a job for the Platform on Agrobiodiversity Research? Which incidentally we have just added to our blogroll. See what I did there?

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Competition for Svalbard?

A world class seed vault has been established on the Siachen Glacier to preserve India’s biological wealth for future generations, Dr. Ajay Parida, Executive Director, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation confirmed on Saturday.

The vault, which has a natural temperature between -20 and -40 celsius, will hold samples of rice, pulses, peas and beans and can be used for building food programmes across the nation.

This was at a meeting in which the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Lars Peder Brekk also participated. I wonder if Mr Brekk mentioned the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

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Locating agricultural origins in Mexico and Italy

I know that domestication is not an event, but a process. I know that most crops and livestock were probably domesticated more than once, in more than one area. I know all this, but I’m still a sucker for papers that come up with specific times and places for the origin of agriculture. Papers such as Daniel Zizumbo-Villarreal and Patricia Colunga-GarcíaMarín‘s in the latest GRACE:

Sympatric distribution of the putative wild ancestral populations of maize, beans and squash indicate the extreme northwest Balsas-Jalisco region as a possible locus of domestication.

The paper is a review. It synthesizes a host of paleoecological, archaeobotanical and molecular data. Meanwhile, another paper, this time in the Journal of Archaeological Science, applies matrix mathematics to a somewhat different, though related, problem: the arrival of wheat in Italy. The authors looked at a selection of old emmer landraces from all around Italy stored in the German and ICARDA genebanks. 1 They developed a matrix of genetic distances among these based on microsatellite data. They then calculated matrices of geographical distances among the landraces based on different putative places of arrival of the crop around the coast of Italy. The two matrices showed the closest correlations for arrival sites located in northern Puglia, the heel of Italy. That corresponds with where the earliest Neolithic sites are found.

Now, I wonder, when will someone apply this method to maize, beans and squash molecular data and test mathematically Zizumbo-Villarreal and Colunga-GarcíaMarín more “qualitative” inferences?