Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
James raises a thought on the discussion of genetic engineers he precipitated:
I think there are many traits that could be generated by the non-profit sector and freely introgressed into lots of different cultivars and landraces which would materially improve the lives of people around the world. It’s much harder (if not impossible) to think of genetically engineered traits that would generate more good than $150 million dollars spent on other projects.
Costs, meet benefits.
Pirates off the coast of Somalia have apparently claimed that they are “coastguards” and that their ransom demands are more in the nature of “fines” on foreign fishing fleets come to steal Somalia’s marine resources. So far, so much fish soup. But according to a study reported by the Associated Press, fishing folk in Somalia have seen increased catches:
“I remember some days I used to go to the sea early to catch fish and would return with no fish, but nowadays there are plenty. You can catch it everywhere,” said fisherman Bakar Osman, 50. “I do not know the reason but I think the foreign fishing vessels, which used to loot our fish, were scared away by pirates.”
Not only that, but the effects are being felt way down the coast in Kenya, where sport fishing is enjoying a boom.
Angus Paul, whose family owns the Kingfisher sports fishing company, said that over the past season clients on his catch-and-release sports fishing outings averaged 12 or 13 sail fish a day. That compares with two or three in previous years.
Somali pirates, Paul said, are a group of terrorists, “but as long as they can keep the big commercial boats out, not fishing the waters, then it benefits a lot of other smaller people.”
Not that that justifies piracy, no sirree. But it does suggest that some countries should borrow a gunboat or two and kick the pescopirates out of their waters. h/t Resilience Science.
Conserving biodiversity is a shared responsibility of stakeholders worldwide, and farmers are willing to do their part.
So says the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, “the farmers’ voice at the world level, representing 600 million family farmers grouped in 120 national organizations in 80 countries”.
“The main issue for farmers is gaining recognition for the multiple roles that agriculture is expected to fulfil and identifying appropriate mechanisms in order to achieve them. We need to help and encourage farmers to improve their current practices, while ensuring they can sustain their families and remain competitive in the markets. These efforts all need be undertaken simultaneously, otherwise you will have food security problems or a compromised ecosystem,” said Ajay Vashee, IFAP President.
No response yet from conservation-wallahs.
Speaking of evil plant breeders:
It is generally thought that continuous selection among crosses of genetically related cultivars has led to a narrowing of the genetic base of the crops on which modern agriculture is based, contributing to the genetic erosion of the crop gene pools on which breeding is based.
But this may be another faulty meta-narrative. At least that’s what a group of researchers from the Dutch genebank say, as a result of a meta-analysis of 44 genetic diversity studies of the varieties of 8 crops released in successive decades. 1 This is the result:
The meta analysis demonstrated that overall in the long run no substantial reduction in the regional diversity of crop varieties released by plant breeders has taken place.
Of course, that says nothing about the relative frequency at which these varieties have been grown by farmers, also an important aspect of overall diversity, along with how different the varieties are. Anyway, that decrease in the 60’s was only about 6%, and that has been reversed since then. How? Because of genebanks, say the authors.
In the 1960s and 1970s the introduction of the new Green Revolution-type cultivars for the major staple crops led to concerns on the disappearance of the world’s varietal wealth of crop plants. The widely shared concerns ultimately resulted in the establishment of a worldwide network of international genebanks hosted by the CGIAR research centres. The seed samples stored in these genebanks facilitated access of the world’s crop diversity to plant breeders world wide. It seems likely that the easy access to crop diversity provided by the genebanks, improved communication among breeders and easier exchange of seeds were factors contributing to the reversal of the initial trend in diversity reduction as observed in this meta analysis. Also the increased use of crop wild relatives for breeding and in recent years the use of synthetic wheats will have contributed to the observed diversity increase.
Well, it will be interesting to see, in due course, whether the restrictions on access which followed the Convention on Biological Diversity, had an effect, and whether the International Treaty on PGRFA eventually set the world to rights. As it was designed to do.
Bruce McF puts that global map of water availability in perspective:
So it might not look like much on the map, but its more than half the Australian population predicted to be faced with high or moderate water stress.
Yikes.