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NGO deconstructs World Seed Conference

This is interesting. Robin Willoughby, Research Officer at Share the World’s Resources (STWR), “an NGO advocating for sustainable economics to end global poverty,” starts his piece in Counterpunch in pretty conventional NGO mode. I don’t know anything about STWR, but the rhetoric is familiar. Taking the recently-ended World Seed Conference and its perceived endorsement of “techno-fixes and monopoly control” as his starting point, Willoughby goes on to say that:

In order to protect biodiversity, adapt to climate change and promote food security, policy-makers must allow farmers to freely save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds in developing countries.

Right. However, he does then go off in an unusual direction.

On the ground, examples such as the Navdanya project in India illustrate the benefits of both storing and sharing seeds as well as the benefits in food security and genetic diversity by allowing open-access to plant genetic resources. Organisations in the global farmers’ movement La Via Campesina also point the way to an alternative agricultural paradigm based on cooperation and reciprocity. In the UK, the Millennium Seed Bank Project at Kew Gardens further illustrates the importance and possibility of the collection, research and development of seeds for the public good. Countries such as Venezuela are also establishing cross-border collaboration and sharing of knowledge on the breeding of plants based on cooperation and for mutual benefit.

What? So, not just sharing of farm-saved seeds to adapt to climate change, then, but “development of seeds” and “breeding of plants.” And genebanks involved in the whole thing. As I say, interesting. Or am I seeing things?

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e-Knowledge about Biodiversity and Agriculture

The annual conference of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), this year entitled “e-Knowledge about Biodiversity and Agriculture,” will be on in Montpellier, France from November 9–13, 2009. This is the first time, apparently, that a TDWG conference will deal with agricultural biodiversity informatics as one of its major themes. As ever, if you’re going, we’d love to hear from you.

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Mapping banana diseases by phone

…Grameen Foundation, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Uganda’s National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO) designed a pilot project to test if data collection and transmission through the use of mobile phones (and GPS units) is a viable alternative to tradition[al] agriculture extension. The project team used identifying, mapping, monitoring and controlling banana disease as a case study to model this new agriculture extension system.

Interesting, no? And, it seems, quite effective. You can read about some of the results at AGCommons. Who’s going to be the first to use mobile phones to map and monitor crop (or crop wild relatives) diversity?

LATER: The BBC has a piece on software for mobiles that will support this kind of application.

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Taxonomists trying to be “minimally disruptive”

A recent article in LifeScientist is a fairly conventional look at the eternal struggle for the soul of taxonomy between the morphologists and the gene-jockeys, though admittedly with an Antipodean slant. What makes it particularly interesting for us here is the choice of examples, which include a crop group in Citrus and its allied genera. It seems that molecular work suggests that the ancestors of the Australian genera in the sub-family Aurantoideae may have got there by “trans-oceanic dispersal,” possibly as a result of “cataclysmic events like cyclones.” Which sounds like something I need to find out more about…

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Twice as much conserved, or about the same extinct?

Ask how much crop diversity has been lost in the past century or so and one answer is bound to come up. “[A]pproximately 97 percent of the varieties given on the old USDA lists are now extinct. Only 3 percent have survived the last eighty years.” That’s how it appeared in the 1990 book Shattering: Food, Politics, and the loss of genetic diversity, and that’s one of the numbers that has become accepted as a scary measure of genetic erosion.

Pat Roy Mooney and Cary Fowler took a list of vegetable varieties available from US seed catalogues in 1903 and asked how many of them were still held in the USDA National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. Their answer: 597 out of 8045, or 3%.

Except that, as is now obvious, 597 out of 8045 is not 3%.

A new paper by Paul Heald and Susannah Chapman at the University of Georgia in the USA says that the figure is wrong, on two counts. First, there’s the little matter of a mathematical error in the original analysis, as presented in Shattering. Rather than 3% — the headline figure — the true survival rate is 7.8%. Or actually, if you count bits of a subsequent analysis by W.W. Tracy, the bloke who compiled the original 1903 list, 7.4%. Tracy noted, as many others have done before and since, that a single variety may go under more than one name. Thus of 578 garden bean varieties listed in the original study, only 185 represented distinct varieties. That difference is essentially trivial.

The other sense in which Heald and Chapman claim that the 3% (or 7.4%, or 7.8% — it really doesn’t matter) figure is wrong is that while 93% of varieties may have disappeared, they have been replaced by other varieties. In their survey of 2004 catalogues, Heald and Chapman count 7100 varieties, “only 2 percent fewer than one hundred years earlier. By this measure, consumers of seeds have seen almost no loss of overall varietal diversity”.

True, as far as it goes. But having berated Fowler and Mooney for not paying sufficient attention to multiple names, it would behoove Heald and Chapman to consider whether, among those 7100 varieties, the amount of genetic diversity is as great as it was in 1903, and whether gardeners are actually getting what they want.

This is certainly not the case in the UK and many other places in Europe, where, for example, there may be many more pea varieties available today, but none of them are the tall-growing varieties with an extended picking season that many gardeners say they would prefer. 1 If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the same is true, though to a lesser extent, in the US.

Heald and Chapman recognize the problem of “how much diversity has been lost” in their summary:

If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful. Perhaps the most accurate measure of diversity would be found in a comparative DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties, work that remains to be done.

Available to breeders? That’s hardly the point. In any case, I’m not sure the story is more hopeful. I agree that a DNA study would be interesting. Would it, though, change anyone’s perception?