Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Snapped on a bus this morning. See the animal there on the left? Does it look like a sheep to you? Does cashmere come from sheep? Would you buy “cashmere” from a manufacturer that doesn’t know what animal produces cashmere? Not even at a 50% discount?
They’re on our list of seed sources, but of course we don’t check each of those all that often, so thanks to our friend Danny for pointing out that the Irish Seed Savers Association has launched a funky new web site. Go, enjoy, help them out.
A user gets stranded in Genebank Database Hell looking for Vavilov’s collections in Tunisia. Not for the fainthearted.
David Zetland has an interesting take on that 40% of American food is wasted paper.
[I]t seems possible to switch all production to organics:
- We can have enough, even with 40 percent lower yields.
- Higher prices would reduce demand for food, and thus obesity. (They may cause people to switch to cheaper foods, but those tend to be better for you — rice vs meat — if you ignore the idea that steakhouse diners will switch to McDs.)
Of course, this will not happen through regulation or a wholesale change in people’s demand for food. It could happen if water or carbon use was taxed: that waste uses 25 percent of fresh water and 300 million bbl oil; that’s not even counting methane resulting from rot.
Our friend Andy Jarvis has been explaining to the readers of ICT Update not only how important crop wild relatives are, but also how geographic information systems can help conserve and make use of these important genetic resources. In the context of a longer article on Eco-efficient agriculture, Andy uses the peanut to point out that:
There are, for example, a total of 69 species of crop wild relatives that are in some way related to the cultivated peanut. Of these, 17 species are under significant threat of extinction from the expansion of the agriculture in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. Our analyses have demonstrated that a further 15 species are significantly threatened with extinction from climate change.
Jarvis and his team at CIAT use GIS and data from existing specimens to predict where important species might be found.
Collectors can then use global positioning systems (GPS), loaded with the data, to locate the vulnerable species and collect their seed.
Will that be enough to preserve the crop wild relatives on which the future of agriculture depends? Who knows. But it is a start.
P.S. In the same issue, Kwesi Atta-Krah, Deputy Direcctor General of Bioversity International, answers some questions about biodiversity, “the richest natural resource“.