Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Ola, on The lactose reflux problem:
Introgression from Neanderthals as a source of adaptive variation is a fascinating hypothesis; I like the idea that Homo sapiens have benefited from alleles from wild relatives. Recent adaptation and all the signs of positive selection in human population following the shift to agriculture based diets expose the fallacy of proponents of the Paleolithic diet … not to mention all the doctor Atkins disciples out there.
Time for a genome sweep.
Well, maybe. The article in The Monitor is a bit confused. Yes, there are wild rices in Uganda. I know because I was (marginally) involved in the 1997 Sida-IRRI project which collected wild Oryza in Eastern and Southern Africa. The material has been conserved since then in the National Genetic Plant Resources Centre for Crops in Entebbe, and has now been evaluated — successfully, it would seem — for resistance to Yellow Mottle Virus. Which is great. But the crossing with cultivated rice has not started in Uganda, I don’t think. The crosses that are alluded to in the article seem rather to have been between Asian rice and cultivated African rice (Oryza glaberrima), presumably aiming to replicate the success of Nerica in West Africa. Anyway, good luck to Drs John Mulumba Wasswa and Jimmy Lamo with the breeding programme.
Hot on the heels of a map showing how warfare has spared hardly any biodiversity hotspot in the past 50 years comes one on another possible threat to agricultural biodiversity. UNESCO has just announced the publication of its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There’s a great interactive website all ready for people to start playing with. Below is a screen shot (there doesn’t seem to be a way to export maps, alas) showing critically endangered languages with fewer than 50 speakers in South and Central America. Worldwide there are 318 such languages.
I’d say a disappearing language was a pretty good proxy for risk of crop genetic erosion. So much to mash up, so little time.
Yes, it’s out. India’s NBAP is online. Unfortunately, the pdf cannot be searched, for some reason, but a quick skim reveals that it does include significant consideration of agricultural biodiversity issues. For example, there’s a discussion of the role of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) in ex situ conservation of crop genetic resources.
Here’s the money quote, on page 52:
Traditional Indian farming systems are characterized by remarkable diversity owing largely to wide spectrum of agro-climatic situations and indigenous cultivars and native breeds adapted to specific local conditions. Notable efforts to collect crop diversity and documenting of livestock breeds notwithstanding, there is a need for on-farm conservation providing appropriate incentives. Ex situ conservation is expected to provide a strong backup to the efforts to facilitate access and meet unforeseen natural calamities. While there is an increasing coherence of policies and programmes on in situ, on farm and ex situ conservation, there is need to further strengthen these efforts.
The recommendations follow on pages 59-60. With regard to on-farm conservation, they are:
And, on ex situ conservation:
Lots of sensible stuff, and it’s good to see agrobiodiversity in there at all. I was particularly interested in the recommendation to establish a national database bringing together all genebanks. Let’s see what happens, maybe it’s a small step out of genebank database hell. No mention of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, though.
LATER: Yes, indeed, the ITPGRFA is mentioned on p. 90. Thanks, Eliseu. Sorry about that. Still trying to work out why I can’t search the pdf… Ah, can’t search online, but can if I download it first.
LATER STILL: Forgot to mention that there are also a number of references to crop wild relatives, check out Table 4, for example.
The picture, from Google Earth, shows a bit of Sudan in December 2003. The white line is 1 km long. I think that’s standing water just above the line, with quite large trees north of the water. How they got there made my jaw drop.
John Greenfield 1 was working on a “Savannah Development Project” almost 40 years ago. The project required a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer to make airstrips for the project’s plane. In between times, John put the bulldozer to other uses:
I constructed a massive absorption bank across a dry Wadi in order to show the Sudanese, the importance of moisture conservation. I remember when I was building this bank thinking, you will be able to see this from the air.
And you surely can! As John points out, one of the big problems with desert soils is that they crust over, so that any rain that does fall runs off and does not penetrate. Slow the flow down, with any kind of barrier on a contour, and the water goes into the soil. John’s idea was for “linear farms” established behind vetiver hedges.
Once you have collected runoff from a wadi, and let it soak in to the soil you can grow some very useful crops that would have been impossible without the moisture conservation. The biggest problem with deserts is uncontrolled runoff – hence my idea of ‘Linear farms’ behind vetiver hedges – a farm 10m wide X 1000m along the hedge equals 1 ha. That is a hectare of land that would produce well, as opposed to the thousands of hectares of little farms producing a few survivors of what was planted.
When I worked in this desert, I use to visit these little farms and talk with the farmers ( who made their money out of collecting Gum Arabic, and were bloody well robbed) We would look at their ‘farm’ and there would be a dozen or so stalks of sorghum waving in the breeze and I would ask why they thought those plants grew well when the rest failed – no idea – on closer inspection of the surviving individuals, they were all, without exception, growing in hollows in the field that the runoff had collected in. Now, I said, if we extended these ‘hollows’ around the contour or across the slope (made contour furrows) then all the seed would flourish. And doing just that enabled me to produce the heaviest crops of Sorghum this area had ever seen.
Did anything ever become of the idea? I doubt it, or we would surely have heard about it. But it seems on the face of it a brilliant technique for using agrobiodiversity to enable farmers to grow more agricultural biodiversity.
And if you want to see for yourself, point GE at 13 05’22.52â€N 30 14’09.07â€E