Posts

Posted on

Protecting rice in Thailand and India

I’ve pointed to a couple of different stories in the past few weeks dealing with the legal protection of rice diversity, and I thought it might be a good idea to bring them together here.

The first concerned aromatic Jasmine rice from Thailand. This was the lead paragraph:

On Wednesday, His Majesty the King applauded Thai scientists and those involved in the patenting of genes that can control the aroma of Thai jasmine rice. His Majesty said the patent would ensure that Thais take pride in eating Thai rice. They won’t have to eat rice that has a foreign patent.

However, it turns out the patent is actually for a transgenic aromatic rice, which is not quite the same thing. In fact, it would be difficult to protect the gene controlling the aroma of Thai rice, because that same gene also controls aroma in all other aromatic rices around the world. A recent paper suggests as much:

The badh2 mutation … [was] surveyed in a representative rice collection, including traditional aromatic and non-aromatic rice varieties, and strongly suggested a monophylogenetic origin of this badh2 mutation in Asian cultivated rices.

The second article is about rice with a red pericarp. This is often said to have health benefits, due to the accumulation of various nutrients along with anthocyanins.

Scientists are trying to protect a traditional rice variety that is on the verge of extinction in Himachal Pradesh. The red rice is more disease-resistant and hardier than strains cultivated commercially over most of India and can lend that through cross-breeding.”We are trying to provide legal protection to the vanishing red rice variety, grown in the state for centuries, by bringing it under the ambit of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001,” R.P. Kaushik, director of the rice research centre at CSK HP Krishi Vishvavidyalaya, an agricultural university based in Palampur. told IANS.

Now, red pericarp is the ancestral state in rice, and it’s occurrence is geographically widespread. 1 So, again, if this rice is to be protected, it could not be protected simply as “red rice”, but rather as a particular, clearly defined, variety of red rice. Anyway, as Bhuwon points out in his comment on the article, if it fetches such high prices as the article suggest, is there really a need for legislative protection?

But then, arguments for legal protection of genetic resources are not always grounded in anything more than a sort of reflexive place-ism.

Posted on

“It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around”

Our title is evolutionary geneticist Arthur Weis to journalist Carl Zimmer on the topic of an experiment he and colleagues at UC Irvine carried out a few years ago where they compared those seeds — that had been “lying around” in the intervening few years in a cool, dry place — with seeds of the same species newly collected from the same sites. The result of the experiment was that…

…[t]he newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years.

The point of Zimmer’s article is that evolution can take place over short periods of time, and that because of climate change “life will undergo an evolutionary explosion.” 2 What Zimmer doesn’t say is that we have about 6.5 million similar samples of seeds in the world’s crop genebanks, and not by serendipity. Some date back decades. There would be a great research programme in comparing the genetic makeup of those samples with newer samples. Assuming that the populations are still there. And that there is enough documentation associated with the samples to find their original collecting sites.

A final thought. The assumptions behind the ecological niche modeling work which has been proliferating of late to predict changes in distributions, for example of crop wild relatives, is that the species don’t move or evolve fast enough to keep pace with climate change. They may well in fact evolve, adapt and survive, and that would certainly be a good thing. But helping them do that through in situ protection should not be an argument for downplaying the complementary importance of ex situ conservation. After all, with the kind of selection pressures likely to be involved, populations are very likely to be significantly genetically narrower in the future. Whether the species adapts or not, we’ll still need to collect seeds and store them in genebanks if we are to have available for use as much as possible of the genetic diversity that is currently — just — still in the field.

Posted on

Fetured: Agri-intellectual fights back

Mike Huben busts the drowning turkey myth, which I should really have checked myself:

But I wouldn’t be in any rush to compliment them on numbers or anecdotes: the turkey drowning story is an urban myth. His calculations on the amount of table scraps needed for fertilizer make all sorts of ridiculous, inefficient assumptions.

And there’s more:

The American Enterprise Institute is a propaganda organ for conservative corporate capitalism. They don’t really care about Pollan’s book…

Read the whole comment. And also the original article’s author on that turkey story:

The turkey story is a result of an interview with Mr. Nieman, the incident occurred about 2 miles from my mother’s childhood home, about 10 miles from where we live now. It’s interesting that the word of the farmer who suffered the loss of his livelihood is not good enough. Mr. Niemann has no reason to lie-neither does my mother, who remembers the incident. And 50 years ago, my grandfather was among the first in our community to build terraces to protect the soil on the farm we still farm. The farm produces more now than it did then. That would be the very definition of sustainability.

Posted on

Old maps used to track down hops in Sweden

ResearchBlogging.orgI’ve done a fair amount of reading and thinking about the theory and practice of germplasm collecting in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across an example similar to the one described in a recent paper in Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. 3

In it, Swedish researchers describe how they took advantage of a couple of interesting quirks in the history of Sweden to devise what I think is a pretty novel strategy for sampling agrobiodiversity. They were interested in collecting germplasm of hops (Humulus lupulus) for a new genebank that’s under development. Now, the thing is that, although this crop is no longer grown in Sweden now, for 400 years from 1442 doing so was compulsory, in order to guarantee sufficient domestic production for beer-making. Very sensible, too.

Initially, all peasants were required to grow at least 40 hop poles. By 1483, the quantity was increased to 200 hop poles. The law was not formally repealed until 1860. As a result of this law, the plant has left several financial, fiscal and legal imprints on Swedish history.

The second historical curiosity about Sweden is that it boasts a unique set of some 12,000 large-scale maps dating back to the mid-17th century. Because of the hops law, hop gardens are actually marked on these maps in some detail (click to enlarge).

hops

So the collectors used what they call a “history to plant” method to identify likely areas for collecting, using not only maps such as the one reproduced above, but also…

…medieval charters from the fifteenth century files of land belonging to the abbey of Vadstena, documents from the expeditions of Carl von Linné and his pupils from the eighteenth century and also documents from the breeding program in Svalöf from the beginning of the twentieth century.

And a pretty successful strategy it was too.

We found no hop plants at locations which were not indicated in the maps as hop gardens. Today living plants were possible to find in more then 33% of the total inventoried sites, indicated as hop gardens on large-scale maps.

As I say, I can’t think of another example of the use of historical maps to locate specific crops for sampling. No doubt the specific circumstances that made this possible in Sweden are not all that common around the world. Anyway, if you know of similar work, let me know. Always interested in keeping up to date with the latest in germplasm collecting.