The USDA’s ARS is apparently optimistic about two new crops they’ve been looking at. Or not so new in one case. Guayule, or Parthenium argentatum, was actually used in pre-Columbian times for its latex. It could also now be a source of bioenergy. And milkweed seems to have a lot of weird uses.
Agrobiodiversity in trouble in Cameroon
Ivo Arrey Mbongaya of the African Centre for Community and Development in Cameroon has a blog on the Eldis Community and has recently discussed threats to two different sorts of agricultural biodiversity in his country. Apparently, goat rearing is in decline, because of the disappearance of grazing land, harsh policies about strays and the lack of veterinary services. He doesn’t say if a local breed is involved, however, and does make reference to “efforts by Heifer Cameroon to distribute cheap animals.”
Also in trouble is “eru,” or Gnetum africanum, a shrub whose leaves are consumed as a green vegetable. Unsustainable harvesting and land use changes are taking their toll, and Ivo recommends taking the plant into domestication.There’s been some work on that by ICRAF and others.
Featured: Assisted living
Vernon Heywood on Assisting crop wild relatives:
Moving species into new environments is … a contentious issue and may involve considerable risks. It is a complex issue involving not just scientific, technical and economic but sociological and ethical considerations. It requires a sound and well thought out policy framework before it is widely undertaken as a management response to global change but might be prove to be appropriate in a number of high priority species such as CWR of major crops.
Who else is doing the thinking? And where?
Assisting crop wild relatives
You may remember my recent nibble on assisted migration. I also sent the link to the CropWildRelatives discussion group, which elicited this response from Nigel Maxted at the University of Birmingham:
This is indeed an interesting question. My first reaction was that it was a purely academic exercise that will do little to benefit overall biodiversity and probably could not be applied for a wide range of species even if this were economically and practically feasible. It might even do harm because government might use research like this to play down the impact of climate change and avoid the necessity of taking harsh economic decisions. This may well be the case, but for the key 500-700 globally important CWR I do think this is the sort of research we should enacting now. These critical 500-700 species will be so vital to future food security, not least to combating climate change itself, that we need to ensure that they are allowed to continue evolving in situ in the changing environment and make doubly sure we have these species’ genetic diversity adequately conserved ex situ. The research need not focus on the entire 500-700 CWR but could be passed through a modeled climate change impact filter first to identify those species most likely to be impacted in the short term and most likely to be successful in transposition. Perhaps as a community the time is right to systematically address this issue.
Featured: Genebanks
Carla Barber, from Canada’s National Research Council Plant Biotechnology Institute, offers a glimpse of the genebank database that will be launched in about a month:
The seed database … supports searching of various scientific data associated with each seed line such as Agronomic, Biochemical, Phenotypic, Genetic, Proteomic, Structural, Publications, as well as the option to integrate more Data Categories in the future.
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