You may remember a post I did last summer on sedges called tules. Although not domesticated, tules have (or had) a lot of interesting uses among the Native Americans of California, including in the construction of boats. People still build tule boats, mainly for fun. I bring all this up because of a recent article on some fascinating new thinking about how people spread around the world. It seems that there is increasing evidence that they may have done so by boat, including perhaps during the initial peopling of the Americas from Asia. In which case they could well have gone from kelp bed to kelp bed in tule boats. Incidentally, the oldest boat in the world is a pine dugout made by the Bog People of NW Europe in about 8500 BC.
Army worms on the march
I think I may have blogged before about the ProMED-mail “global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases & toxins.” You can get email alerts and also produce maps for plant diseases, such as this one:
Unfortunately, the system only covers infectious diseases. It is a programme of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, after all. Otherwise, it would have picked up the plague of armyworms currently affecting Liberia. A quick search of my feed reader revealed outbreaks in Namibia and Zimbabwe within the past two years. And Google Trends shows some interesting, ahem, trends in searching News archives show this timeline for news of this pest 1 over the past few years:
There’s research on natural enemies going on, but that’s not going to help Liberia right now.
Vienna stressfest
I know it’s a long shot, but are any of our readers going to the conference on Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance next month in Vienna? It seems to be mainly about Arabidopsis, but the final session on breeding might just hold some agrobiodiversity interest, and if so we’d love to know about it.
Europe invaded by aliens
The journal Diversity and Distribution has a paper on the distribution of alien plants in Europe. You need a subscription for that, but the paper also appears to be online here, on the website of one of the authors. Here’s the map (click to enlarge it):
Could this be used to estimate the level of threat faced by some crop wild relatives?
Scientific rabble drowns out debate on GM crops
London’s Science Museum, with support from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has staged an exhibit to debate GM crops. Last night saw the actual debate. Our man in the hazchem suit reports:
“Future foods: join the GM debate.†The cry rang out from London’s Science Museum as it worked hard to assemble a public meeting (on 22 January 2009) to debate the issues raised in its temporary exhibition of the same name.
Despite fears from some observers that this debate and the accompanying exhibition were to be used to grace GM technology with phony public endorsement, in reality it all turned out rather different. Whether you were pro, anti or agnostic on the issue of GM farming and food, there was little appetite from the panel of speakers, let alone from most contributors from the floor, for the wholesale adoption of GM crops.
Defra (the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) chief scientific adviser Bob Watson stole the show with his blunt analysis of the real food and nutrition problems facing the world. The goal, he said, has to be how to feed 900 million hungry people in the developing world.
This is not a challenge for technology to solve alone; we need a pro-poor trade regime, we need real rural development; we must put farmers at the centre of the debate and pay them for global public goods as well as food production, said Bob Watson. 2
“We may need GM in the future, but at present it is an oversold technique, which needs examination on a case by case basis,†he concluded.
Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, was equally lukewarm about the prospects for GM crops to solve what he termed the new fundamentals of farming and food production. Any solution has to operate under and — even better — help to solve the global pressures on energy supply, soil quality, water availability, the carbon cycle. To Professor Lang the key GM policy and political issue is ownership of the technology and its control.
As the debate opened up to comment and questions from the floor it soon became apparent that the organisers — who had feared hectoring, unruly behaviour from an anti-GM “rabble†— were in fact faced with irate researchers from such bodies as the John Innes Institute. Their degree of upset that society might wish to have a say on the direction that science is leading them was illuminating.
One such contributor asked why all the speakers were treating GM as a “generic science†with generic risk when each application was different and, in any case, merely mimicked “natural†processes. (All the speakers had carefully talked of “case by case†analysis.)
Bob Watson’s reasoned answer was lost in a cacophony of interruption from other researchers, forcing him to describe their approach as rude and uncivilised. An early retreat to drinks and an interval in debate was hurriedly called before the honour of the scientific establishment could be tarnished further.
Perhaps they do debate differently in Norwich?