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Bactrian camel a little less on the edge

Today’s BBC story about the unexpected birth of a Bactrian camel calf at Knowsley Safari Park in the UK reminded me how little I know about camels — although my performance on the camel question on the recent domestication quiz should have warned me. In particular, I didn’t know that there are wild Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus) in NW China and Mongolia, though admittedly they are down to about a thousand and endangered. It’s unclear from the Knowsley website whether the Bactrian camel birth is part of a captive breeding and re-introduction programme, but there are such programmes there for other species:

Our Pere David’s deer herd is one of the largest in the UK. These deer were classified as extinct in the wild until the mid 1980’s when a group of 39 deer went back to China as part of a project organised by the Zoological Society of London. Four of our deer formed part of this group returned to the 1,000 hectare Dafeng reserve. Now classified as critically endangered, they are protected from hunting on the reserve and the captive breeding herds such as ours at Knowsley are still very important to ensure the future of these deer.

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Database hell squared beckons?

Colleagues at FAO and Bioversity International have a paper out in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis entitled “Food composition is fundamental to the cross-cutting initiative on biodiversity for food and nutrition.” The cross-cutting initiative in question is that on biodiversity for food and nutrition which the CBD asked FAO to lead, in collaboration with Bioversity. And by the “food composition” of the title the authors mean databases which document the nutritional value of foods not just at the level of species, as currently, but of the different varieties and cultivars within species. These will in a way be a central pillar of the initiative. We’ve talked here before about the extensive variation that can exist among varieties in nutritional composition, for glycaemic index, say. And we’ve repeatedly highlighted the work of Lois Englberger and her Pohnpei colleagues in this field, for example. So it is good to hear that food composition tables and databases will be improved to allow the inclusion of infra-specific data. Populating the databases will be something else, of course. The data will need to come from existing genetic resources databases, which currently do not as a rule contain much in the way of this kind of information and are not necessarily equipped to handle it. So this initiative will involve a marriage between two database communities, that of nutritionists and that of genebanks. A difficult trick to pull off. Necessary, and long overdue, but difficult. Stay tuned.

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The politics of toddy

Coconut farmers receive Toddy Movement members released on bail.

That’s the intriguing title of a short piece from Tamil Nadu on the NewKerala.com website. It turns out that dozens of farmers had been thrown in jail a few days ago for tapping coconut toddy without the permission of the state government. The farmers claim that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi has reneged on an election promise to rethink the ban on toddy in force in the state. So they started tapping and selling the beverage in their fields in protest. The reaction seemed a bit heavy-handed to me, but apparently toddy is a bit of a political hot potato (as it were) in Tamil Nadu:

In Tamil Nadu, this beverage is currently banned, though the legality fluctuates with politics. In the absence of legal toddy, moonshine distillers of arrack often sell methanol-contaminated alcohol, which can have lethal consequences. To discourage this practice, authorities have pushed for inexpensive “Indian Made Foreign Liquor” (IMFL), much to the dismay of toddy tappers.

Last year the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Tamil Nadu government to prohibit the manufacture, sale and consumption of toddy in the state (there is no ban in other states). The Chief Justice explained the decision in part thus:

“it is a policy decision of the State government. There is no fundamental right to manufacture or trade in liquor. The problem with toddy is it affects ordinary people in villages. Whisky or other liquor is not easily accessible to the common man.”

So that’s allright then. Now, the statement made in an article in The Hindu a few years back about the consequences of the ban for rural livelihoods may be a bit exaggerated:

The Salem district unit of National Agriculturalists Awareness Movement (NAAM) staged a demonstration here on Friday asking the State Government to allow toddy tapping… They said the denial of toddy tapping had ushered in poverty in rural areas.

But toddy must represent a significant contribution to the income of thousands of farming families — and no doubt has done for generations. And the ban may well be contributing to the disappearance of specialized coconut types. Why replant and tend varieties favoured for toddy if you can’t make the stuff?

Go on, Chief Minister Karunanidhi: legalize it!

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Turning point, or dew on a leaf?

Elizabeth Finkel reports for Science from the 3rd meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Tunis last week. Here’s the bottom line:

In a remarkable and unexpected climax as the meeting drew to a close, the treaty governing body agreed to raise $116 million for a biodiversity fund that would support traditional farmers. That helped avert a crisis of confidence in the treaty, says Bhatti, who calls the meeting “a real turning point.” Worede, more circumspect, describes the biodiversity fund as a “little progress.” However, he says, “Anything voluntary is like the dew on a leaf: It can fall down at any time. The contributions should be binding.” 1

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Conserving evolution

Salvatore Ceccarelli, for many years a barley breeder at ICARDA, tells us about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a holistic approach to adapt crops to agronomy, climate changes and people.

That the climate is changing is now accepted by most, and certainly by old farmers in developing countries who are telling us of less snow falls, less ice in winter, less rainfall, more dusty days, and more importantly declining crop production in face of increasing production costs (fuel to pump irrigation water, fertilizers, etc.).

One question farmers often ask is if and how the crops and the varieties of the crops they grow today, and which provide us with food and feed, will cope with the future climate. The question is not an easy one to answer because while we all know that the climate is going to be drier and hotter, nobody can tell the farmer who asks the question how precisely much drier and hotter it will be in the place where he/she lives. But the same farmers who ask this question also help us to find an answer when they tell us that in years of drought only those farmers who are still growing the old traditional varieties (landraces) are able to harvest something.

Many of these landraces, even when they are no longer cultivated are still kept in genebanks, under very special conditions (low temperature and humidity) to keep them alive for a long time. However, by “freezing” seeds genebanks also “freeze” evolution at the time the landraces were collected, and this is not ideal at a time when we need the crops to be exposed to the changing climate so that they can slowly evolve (adapt) and produce new types that can better endure the future climate. Even if we do not know precisely what the climate will be, we should give the plants the opportunity to find out.

These are the principles of “evolutionary – participatory plant breeding”, a program by which we make available to farmers of different countries populations made by mixtures of landraces of the most important (to the farmers) crops available in genebanks. The mixtures will be planted in contrasting locations, particularly those representing high intensity of abiotic and biotic stresses.

In each location, the population will be left to evolve under the joint forces of natural and artificial selection operated by the farmers — but also by breeders (this is why we call it “participatory”). The system can be considered as a sort of “evolving genebank”. Because the mixtures can be planted in a very large number of locations – and with time can be shared by an increasing number of farmers – the populations are expected to evolve differently, responding not to only to climate changes but also to different types of soil, different agronomy, different uses of the crops and different farmers’ preferences etc. Therefore, in addition to the most obvious benefit of generating better crops for the future climate, this program will give a major contribution to increase agricultural biodiversity with all the associated benefits.

As the populations evolve in different directions, genebanks can periodically store samples of these evolving populations, thus “conserving evolution”.