Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Yes, there’s a twitter feed. Another video on youtube. A splurge on the BBC. And this teaser on Facebook:
On Thursday, Kew will announce a major conservation milestone for mankind. Any guesses?
I’m not sure about that, but I’m looking forward to the continued unfolding of the Royal Botanic Gardens’ new communications strategy, I must say.
We like toddy here. We like to drink it, when we can. And we like to blog about it. We don’t like to read that it is threatened by nasty phytoplasma diseases which “have weakened the health and vitality of coconut trees resulting in scarcity of Kuttanad’s-own pure toddy (Madura Kallu).” Can nothing be done?
In following up a recent University of Nottingham press release (nibbled a few days ago) on a project to breed vegetables with higher levels of Ca and Mg I came across an earlier, related project by the principal investigator, Dr Martin Broadley. This was to evaluate P-use efficiency (PUE) in Brassica oleracea as a model system. There’s lots of genetics, but also this objective:
Determine the PUE of up to 50 commercial B. oleracea varieties and 400 varieties from the HRI Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) representing a wide geographical and genetic distribution of B. oleracea and close relatives
And this deliverable:
A database of Brassica oleracea PUE phenotypes. This database will identify the range of PUE in modern varieties. This will allow varieties to be matched to their nutritional environment. The range of PUE found in accessions in the HRI-Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) will also be defined. This database will be delivered to growers, via a summary factsheet and subsequent consultation.
Cool, I thought. Rather complicated evaluation information on an important collection made readily available to users (breeders, growers, researchers) in a natty database. I had visions of Andy Jarvis and his crew mapping the provenance of accessions on soils base maps to look for correlations between PRU and low P. Problem is, though the dataset is probably somewhere on brassica.info, I wasn’t able to track it down in over half an hour of messing around. No doubt I’m missing something which is right in front of my nose. Alas, the link provided in the project final report seems to be broken. I suspect the data I’m looking for is lurking in the supplementary tables on the project webpage at Defra, but a bunch of spreadsheets is not really what was promised. Another soul-sapping foray into genebank database hell.
Like lots of better-informed people, I too had not heard of Elinor 1 Ostrom, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. But when Luigi alerted me this morning to the award, and I read what he called a “place-marker” post, I had only one reaction.
Many years ago I corresponded a bit with Garrett Hardin, whose paper in Science provided the title for Luigi (and scores of others) to riff on. In the course of that, I said that I didn’t think that the average commons was much of a tragedy, given the various examples he cited of a well-managed commons. And he replied to the effect that the title of that paper was one of his biggest mistakes. He should have called it The Tragedy of the Mismanaged Commons.
Of course I treasure that letter, along with a few others, which is why I kept it somewhere very safe, which is why I cannot now lay my hands on it. And I think of it whenever people assume, as they do all too often, that a commons is inevitably tragic.
All of which hardly matters at all, except that it seems we really ought to know more about Ostrom’s work. Bits and pieces are blipping into life on the radar screen, and will clearly require some study.
This, from Tyler Cowan, is helpful.
For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate. In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law. Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.
I like the idea of “legislation that does not conflict with law”. And this series of posts will clearly repay study.
However, we would like to extend an invitation to anyone out there who would consider rewarding us, and our readers, with a better account of how Ostrom’s ideas might apply in particular to agricultural biodiversity, as a global commons, as a public good, as anything, frankly. You write it, we’ll stick it up here.
Thanks.
Pablo reminds us there’s a lot already going on on “hidden hunger,” but much still remains to be done:
Much work has been done using a range of approaches to increase the micro-nutrient content of foods and diets. My hope is that the “no brainer” the Economist article refers to is to examine the wide range of approaches to addressing micro-nutrient deficiencies in diets and deliver some added value and fill in current gaps in research.