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Agrobiodiversity tourism alive and well in South of France

I’ve been in Montpellier for the past few days attending what is actually quite an interesting conference, which is just as well because we’re out in a pretty uninteresting suburb. We did get a day off on Saturday, but otherwise we haven’t had much free time. A pity, because perusing the little pamphlets describing different local tourist attractions that one finds scattered around the hotel reveals at least three with interesting agricultural biodiversity angles.

One is a boat tour around the Isles de Stel in the Camargue: salt works, horses, bulls, rice fields, local food, the lot. Plus it starts from the fascinating medieval town of Aigues-Mortes. ((Which was the destination of our field trip on Saturday, and the subject of my autostitched photo. Well worth a visit.))


Or you can visit a buffalo reserve near Sainte-Eulalie. This seems to refer to the wisent, saved from extinction by captive breeding in Poland.

And, finally, there’s La Bambouseraie, near Anduze. It’s a botanic garden, resource centre and nursery dedicated to bamboos that was established in 1856 by Eugène Mazel.

Mazel had made a fortune in trading with spices he directly imported from Asia. This activity allowed him to have plants, practically unknown in Europe at that time, sent to him from these distant countries.

Too bad I’m stuck in this hotel. Although, what with the Air France strike and all, I might get the chance for some sightseeing after all.

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Ecology, with an Ö

Carnival alert! Oekologie, a blog carnival about, er, ecology, is back after a short break, hosted by Jennifer at Infinite Sphere. Lots (and lots) about birds, but also some aggish posts that joined ours in the section on Conservation and Social Responsibility. To whit:

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Yes, maybe, no, yes: Transgenes in Mexican maize, after all

Update: The link below was behind a paywall. A new one, via SciDev.net, seems to be open access.
Elena Álvarez-Buylla and co-workers have found transgenes from genetically modified maize in landraces in Mexico. Their paper is to be published in Molecular Ecology, but for now we have this news article in Nature.

The evolving story has multiple layers, including the science ethics controversy. Quist and Chapela published the same finding in Nature in 2001, but their methods were questioned, and the journal made an unprecedented statement saying there had been insufficient evidence to justify the publication. Some saw the hand (and money) of Big Biotech in this ((Conflicts around a study of Mexican crops)), and in the subsequent denial of tenure to Chapela at the University of California, Berkeley (that was later overturned). Now Nature reports that the Álvarez-Buylla paper was not published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) because the journal’s editor-in-chief Randy Schekman, also at Berkeley, considered that “the report could gain undue exposure in the press due to a political or other environmental agenda.”

We’ll see if the current paper settles the scientific controversy. Ortiz-García and colleagues did not find any transgenes in a large sample in 2003/4; a result that was found worthy of publication in PNAS. The Nature news article suggests that Álvarez-Buylla found the transgenes in only one field (out of more than 100 sampled), and that this field was also sampled by Quist and Chapela. So are we talking about a single farmer with a cousin in Iowa sending seed remittances? Or about a relatively small fraction of maize plants across the country?

It seems entirely obvious that if there are transgenes in U.S. maize, these will spread down to Mexico. Someone needs to find them first, for sure, but the more relevant question is not if transgenes spread, but rather: which, where, what mechanism(s) (long versus short distance dispersal), how fast, how much, how persistent, and what are the consequences, if any? The term “pollution” is used a lot in this debate. Me, I do not believe in pure races.

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Plan of action against UG99

Despite reassuring words from the Indian Minister of Agriculture at the start of the meeting ((A while ago the Indian Council for Agricultural Research also suggested that UG99 was not a major threat to wheat production in India)), FAO announced that delegates of the 31 countries represented at the “International Conference on Wheat Stem Rust Ug99 – A Threat to Food Security” in New Delhi have pledged to support prevention and control of UG99. They agreed:

  • to share surveillance information;
  • that a global early warning system should be immediately established;
  • that plant breeding research should be intensified; and
  • that rust resistant wheat varieties should be distributed to farmers.
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Hybrid rice going south

Hybrid rice has been the dominant form of rice seed in China for a while. It has also been spreading to Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines and other places. As you know, seed companies like hybrids because farmers who use them need to buy new seed every year. Farmers like the higher yields. It seems that multinational seed companies are increasing their investments in rice hybrids for Asia. Bayer just announced that is has opened up shop in Suphanburi, a rice growing region north of Bangkok. Thailand is a country hitherto better known for rice quality and exports, than for the use of high yielding varieties. Photo credit: Bayer