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Crop wild relative helps Kew reach 10% milestone

Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank has reached its target of collecting 10% of the world’s wild plants, with seeds of a pink banana among its latest entries.

Congratulations, and happy birthday Kew! Interestingly, the wild banana in question, Musa itinerans, is also found in a genebank in Thailand, apparently as a breeder’s line, so it may well be useful in crop improvement.

LATER: Ok, this is why I talk 1 about genebank database hell. Musa itinerans is in the Musa Germplasm Information System, fourteen accessions of it, 2 conserved in vitro at the International Transit Centre, and in China and the Philippines. But it seems it is not in SINGER, for some reason, which is where I first looked for it. And neither of these two sources seem to have made it to WIEWS.

LATER STILL: And 3 specimens in botanic gardens. GBIF disappointing, only a couple of MoBo sheets. Literature suggests it might be a source of cold resistance, and maybe disease resistance too.

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Global Hunger Index goes interactive

The Global Hunger Index for 2009 has just been released with a very cool interactive map (see above). 3 There’s a general release from our friends at IFPRI and one focused on sub-Saharan Africa.

Coincidentally, or not, this just in: 4

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on Thursday will urge governments, donors, researchers, farmer groups, environmentalists, and others to set aside old divisions and join forces to help millions of the world’s poorest farming families boost their yields and incomes so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.

Gates will say the effort must be guided by the farmers themselves, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.

The occasion for both news items is the award, tomorrow, of the World Food Prize to Dr Gebisa Ejeta.

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Green grants

People sometimes ask us if we have funds to support their work. Short answer: No. Nor are we experts in the finding of financial support. So it was good to see a report at Crops for the Future about Terra Viva Grants. This web site uses a combination of old technology — people — and new technology — the internet — to assemble details on all sorts of entities that fund projects on what they call “the green sector”.

Not being in the market for support (well, not of that sort) I’m not really able to judge how well Terra Viva Grants does the job it sets out to do. I had a quick search for a topic that interests me, and turned up six possible grant-makers; although there is clearly a lot more to getting funded than finding a funder, that’s clearly a good start. There have been similar efforts in the past, and many seem to have fallen by the wayside. Something of this sort is desperately needed, so we can only wish Terra Viva Grants the best of luck.

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Coping with climate change

SciDev.net reports on a project launched a couple of years ago to unite farmers, weather-wallahs and government in Benin to “help farmers make informed choices about when to sow and harvest crops”. About 300 farmers are enrolled in 60 field schools across the country.

[T]o develop, test and implement farming strategies suited to local conditions. These include mulching, planting pits, adopting integrated crop management and using organic fertilisers.

What, no agricultural biodiversity? No new varieties or crop selection? No participatory plant breeding? We think they’re missing a trick.

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Empty vessels and GMOs

You know the old story about the two women ranting at one another from their respective doorsteps on opposite sides of a narrow street. And a passing wit 5 remarked: “They will never agree, for they argue from different premises”. That’s how I feel about almost everything and everyone involved in almost every kind of discussion of genetic engineering.

Watch, if you will, this extract from a longer discussion with Michael Pollan, foodsayer extraordinaire.

Now, tell me, what exactly did he say that might cause someone else to say

I’m thinking he is just another tool. Now he suddenly supports “open source” genetic engineering…absolutely not….playing god/artifically manipulating DNA is not our place.

What’s with the “scare quotes”? How does a self-described seed breeder manage to elide playing god with artificially manipulating DNA?

I’m reminded of another quote, this one definitely attributable to Woody Allen. It runs something like this 6

The great advantage of being smart is that you can always act like an imbecile, while the reverse is never possible.

Hell yeah.