FAO’s online Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum) has just concluded its discussion on “Strengthening Food Security by Empowering Farmers to Contribute to Seed Biodiversity.” A proceedings and summary are available. There were about a dozen contributions. All very well informed, but nothing that was said struck me as particularly novel, including what I contributed. But I’m just be a jaded old curmudgeon. See what you think.
Kyrgyzstan’s fruits and nuts in peril
Fauna and Flora International and its partner in Kyrgystan, the Kyrgyzstan Ecological Public Foundation (TAZA), are trying to take the pressure off the country’s rich fruit and nut forests by introducing alternative energy sources.
TAZA is helping to trial solar energy in fruit drying, stoves, and water heaters in several villages. The reaction from local people is already positive, though the scheme is in its early stages.
There must be a lot of places around the world where something similar has been tried. Any meta-analyses of such interventions?
Diversity, diversity everywhere
Food-based strategies are essential to tackle malnutrition and help vulnerable populations cope with environmental change. Genetic modification, crop diversification and soil management can improve access to vital micronutrients.
More research is needed to identify nutritious crop varieties and analyse indigenous and wild species for their nutritional content. In particular, maintaining genetic diversity within home gardens and local agroecosystems can help improve nutrition.
Music to our ears, of course, but the tune goes back to 2002. Odd — and slightly disappointing — that SciDev.Net could find nothing more up to date on this subject for their recent nutrition blitz. Anyway, good to have the agrobiodiversity song played, however old.
Another piece in the SciDev.Net feature looks at the human genetics dimension of the problem. We’ve talked about that here before. You don’t just need to understand how micronutrient content, say, varies among crops and crop varieties, but, as if that wasn’t enough, also how people vary in their ability to make use of these compounds.
Rational genebank system’s report card
Just how far are we from the efficient and effective global system of genebanks that has been on the horizon since at least 1996? Maybe a little closer, thanks partly to efforts by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Bioversity International to help all those myriad genebanks and their managers to forge a common position. Five years after the Trust began, two of its staff 1 and a colleague from Bioversity have published an assessment of where things stand. 2 Bottom line: Good effort, could try harder.
The report is based on 18 crop strategies and 8 regional strategies, undertaken by the Trust in concert with shed-loads of experts in an attempt to collate what is known and what isn’t. From their consideration of all extant strategies the authors isolate eight themes. In their paper they treat each in detail. I have the luxury of picking cherries.
Regeneration is probably the greatest single threat to the safety of wheat accessions held in globally important genebanks.
And what holds for wheat in globally important genebanks holds for other crops and other genebanks too. Keeping what you have alive is crucial, but it isn’t just the lack of skilled staff that is holding things up. Research is needed to know how best to regenerate and multiply some species, especially wild relatives. And of course while regeneration is the sine qua non of a functioning genebank, it is also fundamental to so many other activities, like having enough stuff to send out, gathering the characterization and evaluation data that make stuff worth sending out, and cleaning up the diseases that make stuff not worth sending out. So regeneration is the number one priority.
Number two, for me, has to be information systems, although it ranks No. 5 in the paper. No need to go into details, except to say that the only way out of genebank database hell is to build information systems that allow different searching styles and different social styles alike to find what they are looking for.
And finally, a little something on user priorities. Information plays a part here. The paper says that:
The greatest constraint on utilization of plant genetic resources by researchers, taxonomists, breeders, farmers, and other users of germplasm presented in the strategies is the lack of accession level information … especially for useful traits.
Well, yes. And am I mistaken, or is this a highly disguised pat on the back?
In order to increase use, there is a continuing need for the creation of greater awareness among policy makers and the general public of the value of crop diversity collections and the global interdependence on those collections for agricultural research.
E non solo, as they say in Italy.
CIAT genebank gets great new image(s)
There’s a great set of photos of the CIAT Genetic Resources Programme up at Flickr. It does pay to have a photographer who knows what he’s doing.
