The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog has a post pointing out the valuable lessons to be learned from the well-documented failure of a project to exploit the wild coffee of Kibale National Park in Uganda, thereby contributing to the park’s protection.

Remembering fondly my own experiences with wild coffee in the mountains of Abyssinia, I noted that Luigi, author of the piece, had mentioned only in passing the importance of wild coffee to breeding programmes. Quite right too; that was not the purpose of the Kibale Forest Wild Coffee project. So let me chime in. Coffea canephora, the species present in Kibale, has provided resistance to root-knot nematodes and is the basis of an interesting approach to improved production, based on hybrid seeds. The importance of wild coffee is evident. The importance of the post at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog less so. It is to win the author an all-expenses trip to India, where he will be able to blog, tweet and status World Environment Day. To help him do that, you need to follow these instructions:

I just entered @UNEPandYou @TreeHugger blogging contest to win trip to India for #WED2011. Read my post and please RT! http://bit.ly/jm7B8y

I’ll be doing just that.

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A chance remark on a friend’s blog prompted me to try and pick up a trail that had gone quite cold. Her friend was remarking that “the dates groves that flourish in Mexico’s Baja California oases were first planted by the Jesuit missionaries with seeds from North Africa”. Vavilov’s contact in Algeria, Louis Trabut, is credited with helping to introduce “hundreds of Algerian plants” into the US, among them the dates alluded to by a commenter on Rachel’s blog post. Back in 2009 I tried following this up but didn’t get very far; now I have, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Two early publications deal with the introduction of dates into the US. Walter Swingle’s The date palm and its utilization in the southwestern states (1904) I’m going to leave for now, not least because I want to give Rachel a fair crack at the whip. Date growing in the old world and the new, by Paul B. Popenoe (1913), however, proved irresistible, for one of the appendices: To Grow Bananas from Date Seeds:

“During the dark ages it was a widespread Arab superstition that bananas could, under certain circumstances, be grown from date seeds. The slight similarity in general appearance between the two plants was elevated to a real relationship, particularly by the Baghdád physician ‘Abdu-l Latif (twelfth century), in his Description of Egypt (pub. at Paris by Imperial Press, 1810, with tr. by S. de Sacy). The writer declares that to make the relationship evident all you need to do is to place a date seed in a fruit of the colocasia and bury it; the result will be a banana plant.

“The plant which the Arabs designate as colocasia (Arab., from Pers., qulqás) is doubtless not Colocasia antiquorum [1] but the sacred water lily of the Egyptians, Nymphea lotus (Castalia mystica). The way in which the writers speak of it shows, however, that they had only a hazy idea in mind, and probably did not really know what plant they were referring to.

Ibn Awám, the Spanish Moor who wrote his treatise on agriculture in the twelfth century, gives more detailed directions for performing the operation, in his chapter entitled “To Make a Date Seed Grow in a Colocasia Root, to Obtain a Banana by the Permission of God.”  [2] He says:

“The manner of operating is to plant a colocasia root in a place constantly exposed to the sun, where one can water it abundantly and continuously and protect it from wind. Water it carefully until the root sprouts; then dig away the earth, split the root with a gold-bladed knife, and in that cleft introduce the date seed. The operation must be concealed in such a manner that the colocasia root can not see what is being done, otherwise the operation will not succeed. The seed used should be from a date of the variety Kasbeh  [3] or any other delicate variety. Bind up the cut with reed leaves or woolen thread and plaster the whole thing over with mud mixed with fine hairs, then cover it four fingers deep with humus. Water it with sweet water daily or every other day until the germination is apparent, then you will see the banana appear. If planted in January or February you will get fruit at the end of summer; this fact is very extraordinary. Some think the seed should be broken before it is put in the cleft; I have tried it without success.

“A witness worthy of faith tells me he has seen the operation performed in the orient in this manner: Take a seed in its fruit, using pains to get a female seed–it is that which is short and not pointed at the end. Introduce the seed in a colocasia root, which resembles a turnip or artichoke root; cover it with a little humus, water it continuously, and abundantly, and there will appear a banana, which is a kind of colocasia, but rare in Spain, if indeed it is known at all.”

Another MS. version, more probably correct, makes Ibn Awán say that he has never been able to try the operation, because he could not secure any colocasias.”

Why mention this? Certainly not to poke fun at mistaken beliefs. Partly because it’s just fascinating, and I wanted to share. Partly, too, because having learned recently of The Filāḥa Texts Project, and being utterly ignorant of Arabic, I wanted a reason to poke around there. Having done so, I was a bit surprised to see this comment:

“As for my own contribution, I put forward nothing that I have not first proved by experiment on repeated occasions” (Ibn al-‘Awwām, Clément-Mullet 1866, I, p. 9). He records, for example, his experiments in grafting the wild olive of the mountains with the domesticated olive of the plain, and his successful cultivation of saffron, under irrigation, in the mountains (Bolens 1981, p. 30).

Popenoe’s doubts then make sense, but I’m singularly ill-equipped to know; maybe an authentic Arab scholar can help.

Notes:
  1. Taro, Colocasia esculenta. []
  2. A chapter I have not been able to find. []
  3. About which Popenoe waxes lyrical in the extreme. []

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The N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) recently published a summary of the two-day meeting on the nutritional value of the berry fruits in the VIR’s collection at Pavlovsk and a policy statement by the International Working Group.

Has there been any response from the authorities?

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Vavilov in a novel

by admin on April 12, 2011 · 0 comments

Anne Marie Ruff is a reporter and friend of the Vaviblog who wants to let readers know about her first novel, Through These Veins.

With the recently published novel, Through These Veins, I am hoping to introduce Vavilov and his mission to a completely new audience; readers who enjoy a good yarn and who may never have heard the word biodiversity before.

In the story, Vavilov’s real life is interwoven with the fictional life of a modern day plant explorer – an heir to Vavilov’s understanding of the tremendous value of wild and cultivated biodiversity with which humans interact all over the planet.

In the coffee-growing highlands of Ethiopia, the plant explorer (inspired by a charismatic Italian Bioversity scientist) on a plant-collecting expedition discovers a local medicine man dispensing an apparent cure for AIDS. As the medicine man’s teenage daughter reveals the plants behind the cure, their lives become irrevocably intertwined. Through These Veins weaves together the dramatically different worlds of traditional healing, US-government-funded AIDS research, and the pharmaceutical industry in an intensely personal, fast-paced tale of scientific intrigue and love, with both devastating and hopeful effect.

The novel is the product of years of reporting on the biodiversity community, which allowed me to travel to several of the same countries where Vavilov explored and collected.

As admirers of Vavilov and biodiversity proponents, I hope Vaviblog readers will welcome Vavilov’s appearance in a fictional story. And if you think your friends beyond the biodiversity community might enjoy the story, so much the better.

All profits from the sale of this eBook ($3.45 of the $4.99 price) will be distributed to the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation in Ethiopia and the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. The print version of the book is expected in June 2011.

If you want to know more about this project, follow Through These Veins on Facebook.

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A second wonderful statement, this time from Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, delivered to the World Grain Forum in St Petersburg in June 2009.

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“…To finish my introductory speech, I would like to emphasize the absolute importance of research in crop science. Therefore, it is utterly not by accident that this forum is held in St Petersburg, home city for the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry –- a research centre of global significance, the holder of a unique collection of more than 200,000 crop accessions. Searching for innovations, applying modern agricultural technologies and using achievements of plant breeding and seed science are the requisites for dynamic development of grain production.”

Did he have some inkling of the devastation awaiting Russia’s wheat harvest, and much else, in 2010? And does his heartfelt concern about the importance of research and plant breeding extend beyond grains to, say, the fruits and berries currently still at risk in the field genebanks of Pavlovsk Experiment Station?

Photo by kromka, used with permission.

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The Director of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolay Dzyubenko, reminded participants at last week’s berry meeting that the Russian Federation had made firm commitments to share its genetic resources with the world. He mentioned two recent statements by political leaders, and thanks to the good offices of Sergey Alexanian, Vice Director for International Relations at the Vavilov Institute, we can share them here.

4110457440 bfc89e3baf m Speaking at the World Summit on Food Security at FAO headquarters in Rome in November 2009, the Minister of Agriculture Yelena Skrynnik said: “Russia supports the collective efforts of the world community in their struggle against hunger, and … As an explicit contribution to the solution of this task, Russia is ready to commence the procedure of incorporating the renowned unique global plant genetic resources collection of the Vavilov Institute into the system of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.”

Not too sure how that’s going.

Photo Copyright FAO.

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A second round-up of events today at the meeting about the crop diversity collections of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, which are threatened with destruction for housing

The second day of the meeting [1] was a chance for the project team to provide some context for their work of the past 3 years, for an audience which on this occasion included not just VIR staff, as on the previous day, but researchers from agricultural universities and the Institute of Botany, a representative of the Ministry of Agriculture from Moscow, and the local media.

First, Professor Nikolay Dzyubenko, the director of VIR, gave an overview of the history of the institute and its achievements. Despite a tight budget, the institute perseveres in its collecting, evaluation, distribution, breeding and research work. For example, almost 4,000 accessions were added to the collection in 2010 as a result of collecting in Russia and some neighbouring countries; 15,000 accessions were evaluated; and about 20,000 distributed, mainly to breeding institutes around Russia. We were reminded that the Russian Minister of Agriculture told the world at a high-level meeting on food security at FAO in November 2009 that VIR’s collection was available for use by the world’s plant breeders in their efforts to adapt crops to climate change. Next year will be the 125th anniversary of Vavilov’s birth, and celebrations are being planned.

The celebrations, however, are bound to have a hollow ring to them if the problems that the Pavlovsk Station has been experiencing of late are not resolved.

We heard the latest news from Artem Sorokin, who also outlined the history and make-up of the collection. A moratorium is now in place, as of 9 December 2010, on any commercial development of the site. And the composition of the expert commission that will decide on the future of the station has apparently been agreed. It looks like they may visit the station in May. Still all to play for. In parallel, VIR is working with the Ministry of Agriculture on the text of a law on plant genetic resources that will seek to settle the legal standing of germplasm collections, and put their funding on a more secure footing.

Luigi Guarino of the Global Crop Diversity Trust attempted to put the work of VIR in a wider institutional context. The Trust has been very active in an international campaign to support VIR’s efforts to save Pavlovsk. The length and breadth of expertise at VIR, and the historical importance, uniqueness, size and diversity of the collections it manages, strongly suggest that it could — and should — play a regional, and indeed global, role in the long-term conservation and availability of crop diversity. The best way it can show its readiness and ability to do this is by sharing data through such platforms as Eurisco and Genesys. And by placing its collections in the Multilateral System of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. We were assured during the Q&A that VIR is working hard for Russian ratification of the Treaty.

Finally, Jessica Fanzo, Bioversity’s nutritionist, provided a frightening summary of Russian health. In 2001, the latest year for which she could find solid data, 10% of Russian children were malnourished, and 50% of adults overweight or obese. That’s a stunning double burden, driven by the unrelenting “modernization”, and concomitant simplification, of diets. Fanzo quoted the Federal Consumer Protection Service as saying that Russia is losing its culinary traditions. And with them, she added, its health. That’s why projects such as the one just ended are so important. This new research on the nutritional quality of some of the berries in the Pavlovsk collection represents a new sort of collaboration, between genebanks and nutritionists, which will hopefully help forge new connections, between local plant genetic resources and better nutrition.

There was much spirited discussion of this topic, which obviously struck a chord with the participants, who bombarded Jessica with requests for nutritional advice. One response stuck in my mind. Jessica was asked whether one couldn’t get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from pills. She said yes, but you have to get everything else from food, so why not the vitamins as well, by choosing your food better?

Much remains to be done in making that connection between local berries and better nutrition in Russia. Research will be needed on bioavailability, on the health impact of increased consumption, and on the best ways to approach promotion. But the first link in the chain is in place, in that we now have a clear idea of the great nutritional value of many of the accessions in the Pavlovsk collection. What a tragedy it would be if the collection were to be lost now, just as we begin to truly understand how valuable it could be to Russia, and indeed the world. That, at any rate, is the gist of the statement that will come out of the meeting, and the message that the journalists present will hopefully take back to their readers, and everybody back to their families.

Notes:
  1. Conservation, characterization and evaluation for nutrition and health of vegetatively propagated crop collections at the Vavilov Institute, a partnership between VIR, the Centre de Recherche Public–Gabriel Lippmann in Luxembourg and Bioversity International. []

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Under the stern gaze of founder NI Vavilov, more photos from the meeting in St Petersburg to review results of a project to investigate the nutritional qualities of the fruits conserved at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station field genebank. Yesterday scientists spoke about their findings. Today, they hope to persuade the authorities to lift the threat hanging over Pavlovsk.

Nikolay Dzyubenko

Nikolay Dzyubenko, Director General of the VIR, demonstrates the number and size of genebanks around the world.

Artem Sorokin,

Artem Sorokin, Head of Fruit Crops Genetic Resources Department and Curator of the collection, shows a map of proposed changes to the land at Pavlovsk

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This just in from Our Man on Nevsky Prospekt with the thermal underwear and the Kevlar vest.

Do 4,700 berry plants, belonging to 542 species, 165 genera and 48 families have a value that is greater than what you’d pay for the land they’re sitting on? The question may not be stated so boldly in the project document. After all, that was written long before the recent problems at Pavlovsk, but answering that question is basically the objective of a project [1] that is drawing to a close with a two-day meeting in St Petersburg this week.

We heard today from Pablo Eyzaguirre of Bioversity that according to the World Bank the Russian Federation foregoes $300 billion in national income due to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and the like. As Arten Sorokin, head of VIR’s fruit and berry department, pointed out, at least a partial solution to that would be for each Russian to eat twice as much fresh fruit and berries. These are a part of Russian foodways that is being overtaken by the global shift to “modern” diets, to disastrous effect. How can the genebank help to turn back the tide of Coca Cola and Big Macs?

Well, clearly, an important first step is to quantify — and publicise — the nutritional value of the different species and accessions it has been maintaining so painstakingly and laboriously for years and decades, work that is now threatened. For the berry plants in question are indeed those at VIR’s Pavlovsk Research Station. Project staff have been measuring things like the mineral nutrient and antioxidant content and sugar profiles of the berries, as well as the genetic diversity of the collections (using microsatellites). The project has focused on blackcurrant (Ribes), blue honeysuckle (Lonicera) and Raspberry (Rubus). There are respectively 870, 46 and 153 different samples of these berries at Pavlovsk, and a few more in other VIR genebanks in other parts of the country, collected from throughout the former Soviet Union and beyond. Isabelle Lefevre summarized the results of the past three years of lab work. [2]

It turns out that there are big differences between the genera in all the nutritional qualities measured, but in no case was there a clear correspondence between groups of genetically similar accessions of a given species and groups of biochemically similar accessions of that species. There is as much variation in nutritional quality within genetic groups as between.

There was some discussion of whether using ecogeographic groups rather than genetic groups would give a better correspondence with the biochemical profiles. But the results as they currently stand mean that two nutritionally “good” accessions are no likelier than any others to be genetically similar. So one could promote multiple varieties high in nutritional quality without worrying overmuch about narrowing the genetic base of the crop. Also, for blackcurrant at any rate, anthocyanin content was correlated with high mineral levels, so one could theoretically select the nutritionally “good” varieties on colour.

But, as Jessica Fanzo, a nutritionist at Bioversity, pointed out there are of course a number of steps before a genetic resource becomes a nutritional resource. Place of cultivation, processing, and bio-availability all have to have their say. But the project team did put together by the end of the first day the elements of a message that could be of great interest to the wider group that will assemble tomorrow for the second day of the meeting, and which will include the media. In essence, a serving of some berries provides a level of antioxidants known to have protective properties with regard to heart disease and some cancers.

NI Vavilov and workers at Pavlovsk in 1927

NI Vavilov and workers at Pavlovsk in 1927

That relatively simple message about the value of the collection needs to be seen in wider context, however. It isn’t enough to turn around and save only the nutritionally good accessions, because there are still many question for the full collection to answer. How well do they grow? Which are more adaptable? Are adaptability and, say, nutritional value found in the same samples, or is breeding going be needed? You can surely think of others.

Nevertheless, there is a clear message. Some of the accessions investigated by the project are nutritionally much more valuable than others. Thanks to the project, we know which berries they are. Thanks to Pavlovsk, we have the berries. On that basis alone, surely they’re more valuable than the land they occupy on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Let’s hope that the project team is successful in getting that policy message across tomorrow.

Notes:
  1. Conservation, characterization and evaluation for nutrition and health of vegetatively propagated crop collections at the Vavilov Institute, a partnership between VIR, the Centre de Recherche Public–Gabriel Lippmann in Luxembourg and Bioversity International. []
  2. And look what I found: Investigation of genetic diversity in Russian collections of raspberry and blue honeysuckle. []

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This photo was smuggled from a meeting being held in a secure bunker under conditions of utmost secrecy. [1] It shows Sergey Alexanian, Vice Director for International Relations at the Vavilov Institute (left) and Pablo Eyzaguirre, Senior Scientist at Bioversity International. Extensive research reveals that they may possibly have been discussing an Investigation of genetic diversity in Russian collections of raspberry and blue honeysuckle. But then again, maybe not. More when we have it.

Meanwhile, here’s something to be getting on with, from the Heritage Fruits society of Australia.

Notes:
  1. How else to explain it’s near invisibility? []

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