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Kenyan farmers reject technology solutions

Farmers are saying traditional crops were much better because they rarely ever lost everything even in the worst of droughts.

Well, well, well. That’s from a news piece in The Nation, explaining that many farmers are turning away from improved varieties of maize and beans because they don’t deliver a reliable harvest. Kenya does put a little money into its “orphan crops programme,” designed to rehabilitate traditional crops such as cassava, sorghum and millet; The Nation stops just short of calling for more research into these crops.

And that, in a microcosm, is the entire story of international investment in agricultural R&D. Not enough, on the wrong things, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Philip Pardey and his colleagues Julian Alston and Jennifer James have published a paper on Agricultural R&D Policy: A Tragedy of the International Commons that makes for pretty grim reading. They analyse the extent of the current failure to invest and the reasons for it, useful ammunition for anyone who needs to know these things. And they offer some possibilities for the future, which personally I found less than convincing.

The Nation noted that scientists need to move speedily, to prevent the current food crisis one day being remembered as a picnic. But not all scientists are the problem. They chase money, and they solve the problems the money asks them to solve. The money needs to sit up and pay attention.

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Professor screws up on domestication?

I’m having a domestication research moment today, after reading an interview full of inaccuracies by a renowned professor (I won’t name names). After spotting two major screw ups in his logic and several outright wrong ‘facts’, I’ve decided to be more thorough and start digging into West African yam domestication and the process that leads to it.

Oh name names, Mathilda, please!

Incidentally, there’s lots of agrobiodiversity stuff, including on domestication and crop wild relatives, at the open-access journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications. Just found out about it at Cultural Landscapes.

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Heirloom tomatoes in the news…a lot

Stuck at home in bed over the past few days I’ve amused myself by looking at trends in the volume of googling for “seed bank” and “Svalbard” and of news items about armyworm outbreaks.

Anyway, here’s another one. It seems that there has been a steady increase over the past few years in news stories about heirloom tomatoes.
heirloom

News peaks in summer, not surprisingly. Interestingly, the search pattern, which is not as clear-cut as that for news shown above, does not coincide with that for “seed banks.”

Well, all this is great fun, of course, but does it have any practical use? I mean along the lines of the recently-announced flu early warning system. Problem is, plant diseases don’t really generate the levels of interest of things like flu. Except maybe Ug99. So what is it good for, agrobiodiversity-wise? Apart from playing around when one is ill, that is.

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Through the genebank looking glass

As a contribution to the ongoing discussion of genebank database hell, we’re pleased to provide a platform for Michael Mackay, the person responsible for the bioinformatics projects at Bioversity International. At least until he gets a platform of his own …

Many thanks to Dirk van Enneking (and others) for providing some constructive input into suggesting what sort of information and functionality users of plant genetic resources (PGR) might actually want to see to help them locate and select accessions for their research and plant improvement activities. My understanding of the situation is comparable to Dirk’s.

  • Is it a telling sign that there is only one response to my request for a profile of what germplasm users want from an information system in about four months?
  • Is it such a boring and useless endeavor (to provide an online PGR information system) that it does not really matter what information and functionality is provided?
  • Perhaps we have been socially engineered to accept mediocrity and now we are prepared to accept token systems?

In starting work on Global-ALIS (ALIS = Accession Level Information System), one component of the Global Information on Germplasm Accessions (GIGA) project that will build a single internet doorway to more comprehensive information on over 2 million accessions held in genebanks around the world, we are finding a lot of information to support Luigi’s original post Lost in genebank database hell and subsequent points raised in response — including Dirk’s contribution.

One thing we learn is that a lot of data has been accumulated but it is not all made available, possibly for reasons other than intellectual property issues. For example, several people involved in genebank PGR documentation have said that if no one uses the online systems (because they are not useful for the purpose of finding and selecting germplasm for research and plant improvement) then what is the sense in continually updating the data?

Another issue is the availability of characterization and evaluation data. At the moment it seems that only the GRIN system makes significant progress on this count.

A third issue is adding value to existing data. Luigi mentioned geo-referencing and implied spatial analysis as useful ways to better understand distribution and, perhaps, add value to existing data in term of quality and usefulness.

I am pleased to say that we are addressing these issues, and more, in the development of Global-ALIS. However, the eventual utility of this system (due to be deployed in early 2011) could reflect the input and suggestions of those who want to explore and utilize all that genetic variability buried deeply in the world’s genebanks.

We are about to build a Global-ALIS website where people will be able to make suggestions and comments on what genebank database heaven might be like, what features it would have and how people might use it. Dirk’s and everyone else’s positive comments are great stuff! We will certainly take these suggestions on board. The only caveat I need to make is that we cannot do everything at once, so please be prepared to prioritize your suggestions to help us address the issues that will have the most impact in the first instance.

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Adding a link

While we’re not willing to review or link to entirely unrelated sites, we are willing to share a bit of Google-juice, for example with Gary Robertson, who asked us nicely to link to The Green Providers Directory. Not a lot there on seeds, but take that as an opportunity.