Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
We need to look at food security not only in terms of quantity of food but the quality of food, that will have an impact on health outcomes. And that requires diverse diet based on a broad use of local agricultural biodiversity.
Emile Frison, Director-General of Bioversity International, in a Q&A with Sabina Zaccaro and Miren Gutierrez of IPS.
The suggestion has just been published that leaf variegation may have evolved as a defence mechanism against being eaten. Variegated leaves look like they’ve already been attacked, so they’re avoided by pests. Working on an Ecuadorian rainforest floor aroid, researchers found that
While moths infested almost 8% of green leaves, they infested 1.6% of variegated ones and just 0.4% of those painted to look like they were variegated.
Damn, another paper to read. This one is in Evolutionary Biology.
There are lots of variegated taros. Would it help to scatter a few around a field, I wonder? Or even to invest in some correction fluid…
There’s an extremely intriguing article in Sunday’s North Platte Telegraph. North Platte is in Nebraska, and the story is bylined Kearney, which is in the same state. Nebraska is home to the Pawnee people, 1 and the article is basically an account of a tribal function held last Friday “to welcome Pawnee tribal members back to their ancestral lands.” During the luncheon, Tom Hoegemeyer, described as a geneticist “whose family operates a large Nebraska seed corn company” and who “is chairman of a U.S. group working to enhance U.S. germplasm of corn,” gave a keynote in which, among other things, he said that
“We’ll do everything in our power to address the Pawnee corn.”
Pawnee corn is an issue because
Attempts to grow the tribe’s traditional varieties have had mixed results. Some seeds will not germinate, EchoHawk said.
EchoHawk is
the Pawnee’s director of education and is one of three women known as the “corn sisters” because they are attempting to revive the strains of corn the tribe grew on its ancestral lands in Nebraska.
As I say, intriguing. And fascinating. I want to know more. What’s wrong with the Pawnee’s corn, exactly? Stay tuned.
Extra information: More on the rescuing of Pawnee corn and Pawnee corn pix.
Dave Wood comments on UG99 myths, and then adds, perhaps provocatively, that
The current fashion for the on-farm conservation of crop diversity ignores the inevitable conservation of diverse plant diseases, some of which, like Ug99 of wheat, can cross continents on the wind and threaten crop production globally.
“Ignores” may be a bit strong here. Is not (one of the) explicit point(s) of on-farm conservation to allow continued co-evolution of crop and pest? On-farmers, over to you!
I am currently based in New Zealand and have access to Taro in a few varieties , via the Pacific Island communities, one of which is the wild version, which has notably black stems. This is not true of Madumbi, which also has a flower very similar to the Arum. I would be very keen to grow the South African variety as it is a very different flavour to the common Pacific Taro which as previously noted is very bland. Here is a link to a picture of the flower …
I did some more Googling, and found out a bit more about the project and its originater; depending on the story that’s either “Dr James Hartzell, a self-proclaimed ‘white boy from New York’,” or Professor Thembinkosi Modi, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Agricultural Sciences. (Modi won a TWAS (Third World Academy of Science) Young Scientist Award in 2007.) Whatever, the end result was an organic cooperative of growers sending the amadumbe (or amadumbi) to a supermarket chain. Everything seemed rosy, with farmers reporting higher incomes that they were using to improve their lives, buying better houses, medical care, and education for their children. Except that there seems to have been a worm in the amadumbe: free-riders. Who were they?
Members who were male, poorly educated, partially certified, aware of loopholes in the grading system, and who did not trust the buyer.
The authors of the paper quoted above make specific recommendations to deal with the problem, but I cannot discover whether anything came of them. I’m also no aroid taxonomist, and frankly I’m not sure how informative the flower photo is, 2 but there you have it. Now, maybe other people can chime in with more information.