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What’s your favourite agrobiodiversity read?

A request comes in from our friend Danny Hunter. Help him out!

Now that the noughties have drawn to a close I would like to ask colleagues what they felt were their top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade. It might be an article or a book. It might even be a blog or one of the new fangled ways of disseminating information. It could be something general or a specific piece of work that was fundamental to our understanding of agricultural biodiversity, how it is conserved, managed, utilised. As well as the details of the article or book, a brief explanation of why you thought the work important would be much appreciated.

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What percentage Neolithic are you?

A big new human genetics paper in PLOS has been making a big splash. It tries to distinguish between two extreme possibilities about the people of Europe:

  • Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.
  • Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas.

The title gives it away: “A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages.” Based on one key Y-chromosome haplotype, it goes for the first option, which is a similar result to studies using mtDNA, although other studies do not agree quite so much. Those old hunter-gatherers — or their genetic traces at any rate — are only to be found in Finland now. The rest of us Europeans can trace our origin to a greater or lesser extent back to the first farmers, those who built Çatalhöyük, for example. Until, that is, the next big new human genetics paper.

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Helping Haiti

Difficult to say anything new about what’s going on in Haiti. It is all sad beyond belief. WWF is rightly encouraging people to give. Seconded. UNEP has announced an environmental recovery effort. There’s no shortage of advice on what must be done. FAO is trying to raise money to support food production in fields and homegardens. The planting season starts in March, so time is short. Meanwhile, CABI’s blog looked at the underlying food security problems.

I haven’t come across any information on what’s happened to the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation Agricole (MARNDR), but I don’t hold out much hope. It housed the national germplasm collection of 513 beans and 54 maize accessions. SINGER lists 233 accessions from Haiti, almost all rice (48), beans (113) and maize (67). GRIN lists 111 (almost all rice, maize, cotton, beans). 1 At first sight it seems that maybe most of the stuff that is in MARNDR should be findable elsewhere, though that’s quite a lot of beans.

LATER: IFPRI DG has his say too.