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International Plant Genetic Resources Inst i tute

GeneflowA PUBLICATION ABOUT THE EARTH’S GENETIC RESOURCES

20

04

Special Section: The Global Crop Diversity Trust

International Plant Treaty Becomes Law

Managing EditorRuth D Raymond

InternBen Rosenberg

Layout and productionMaxtudio, Rome, Italy

Design Patrizia Tazza

Cover Photo© Mark Henley/Panos PicturesFarmer bringing fresh produce across the Yamuna River near the Taj Mahal, to sell at market. Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India.

© International Plant Genetic Resources Institute 2004

ISBN 92-9043-644-1

Glossary

Geneflow ’04 A PUBLICATION ABOUT THE EARTH’S GENETIC RESOURCES

International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI)

Via dei Tre Denari 472/a00057 Maccarese, RomeItaly

Tel: 39 06 6118 1Fax: 39 06 61979Email: ipgri@cgiar.orgWeb: http://www.ipgri.cgiar.orgDiversity for Development

IPGRI gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the Global Crop Diversity Trust to the production of this issue of Geneflow.

Accession Plant sample, strain or population held in a genebank or breeding programme for conservation or use

Biodiversity The total variability within and among species of all living organisms and their habitats

CGIAR The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an association of private and public donor agencies that supports the work of 15 international agricultural research centres, known as the Future Harvest Centres

Crop diversity the variation between and within crops and between crops and their wild relatives

Cryopreservation Conservation in very cold temperatures, usually in liquid nitrogen

Ethnobotany The study of the plant lore and agricultural customs of a people

Ex situ conservation Conservation of a plant outside of its original or natural habitat

FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Genebank Facility where germplasm is stored in the form of seeds, pollen or in vitro culture, or in the case of a field genebank, as plants growing in the field

Genetic modification Alteration of the genetic material of living organisms in order to make them capable of producing new substances or performing new functions. The term is often used in cases when biotechnological techniques have been used (referred to as genetic engineering) that induce genetic changes that would not normally occur in nature.

Genotype 1. The genetic constitution of an organism 2. A group of organisms with similar genetic constitutions

Germplasm A set of genotypes that may be conserved or used

In situ conservation Conservation of plants or animals in the areas where they developed their distinctive properties, i.e. in the wild or in farmers’ fields

IPGRI The International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, the world’s largest international research institution devoted solely to promoting and supporting the conservation and use of agricultural diversity

Morphology The branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of organisms without consideration of function

Plant genetic resources The genetic material of plants, which determines their characteristics and hence their ability to adapt and survive.

Simbiont An organism in a symbiotic relationship

Sustainable development Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (as defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development)

UNEP-GEFThe Global Environment Facility (GEF), established in 1991, helps developing countries fund projects and programmes that protect the global environment. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is one of three implementing agencies that managing GEF projects, the others being the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank.

Wild relative A non-cultivated species that is more or less closely related to a crop species (usually in the same genus). It is not normally used for agriculture but can occur in agro-ecosystems (e.g. as a weed or a component of pasture or grazing lands)

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A community seed-bank in Bara, Nepal. Here seed is stored in the traditional way: in clay pots sealed with animal dung.

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This is the vision of Dr Emile Frison, the new Director General of IPGRI. Formerly the Director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, Frison brings a strong vision and enthusiasm to IPGRI as the organization enters a period of great change.

Emile Frison is a Belgian national who obtained an MSc from the Catholic University of Louvain and a PhD from the University of

Gembloux, Belgium. After working as an agricultural researcher in Africa for six years and as Development Manager of an agrochemical company in Belgium for three years, Frison joined IPGRI (then known as the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources) in 1987.

In his first years at IPGRI, Frison coordinated research on plant health aspects of international germplasm transfer. In 1992, he was appointed Regional Director

for Europe. As Regional Director, Frison, with FAO, helped launch the European Forest Genetic Resources Programme, which promotes the conservation and sustainable use of forest genetic resources in Europe.

When former Director General Dr Geoffrey Hawtin left IPGRI to become the Interim Secretary for the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the position of Director General was filled through an international search. “IPGRI evolved a lot under Geoff Hawtin,” said Frison, explaining his motivation for applying for the position. “I saw the potential for IPGRI to become even more relevant in its goals. In the past, IPGRI focused much of its attention on the conservation side of plant genetic resources. I wanted IPGRI to work more directly with people: the rural farmers in developing nations who are most in need of our support.” Dr Frison assumed the office of Director General on 1 August 2003.

Perhaps the most important development at IPGRI during Frison’s first year in office

has been the development of a new strategy for the institute. “We want to create a people-centred focus that better incorporates IPGRI’s goals into the organization’s structure,” he explained. (For more on the new IPGRI Strategy, see p.2).

IPGRI has seen other changes under Frison’s leadership in the past year as well, such as a stronger focus on the links between diversity and nutrition. He gave a keynote address at the Seventh Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (known as COP 7), describing the importance of nutrition in solving the world’s hunger problems and the role that diversity plays in supporting nutrition. “We are really entering uncharted territory in placing such an emphasis on diversity and nutrition,” said Frison. “Linking the two puts the focus squarely on the people who most need IPGRI’s assistance.” (For more on diversity and nutrition, see p.8).

Dr Frison is also interested in seeing the fifteen Future Harvest Centres work in closer collaboration to meet the global challenges of food security, poverty, and environmental protection. “With a greater capacity

for collective action, we can make true progress in reaching our goals,” said Dr Frison.

As for the future, Dr Frison spoke openly of his desire to see IPGRI and its work more widely recognized. “We have to increase public awareness to make our name and our work known,” he said. “I want IPGRI to be the leading organization in the world on agrobiodiversity research. We should be the reference point for the global community.”

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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“I want IPGRI to demonstrate the benefits of

diversity for people. I see this as a tremendous

opportunity to make a relatively bold change in how

we work with people.”

Emile Frison: The new Director General of IPGRI

Dr Emile Frison, Director General of IPGRI.

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On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, IPGRI has released a strategy to guide its programme of work over the next decade. The new strategy charts a course for achieving IPGRI’s goal: to help ensure that people today and in the future have better lives through the use of agricultural diversity in their farm and forest systems.

“The strategy puts poor people firmly in the centre of the institutional agenda,“ said Emile Frison, Director General of IPGRI.”This is not revolutionary. It codifies an evolution that IPGRI has been making for several years to recognize and support the link between the use of agricultural diversity

and better livelihoods, improved food security and environmental health.”

The strategy was developed through a year long process involving massive consultation with stakeholders. In-depth interviews, face-to-face or by telephone, were conducted with 90 opinion leaders, drawn from the ranks of IPGRI’s existing and potential partners. In addition almost 900 people, culled from IPGRI’s contacts database, were asked to take part in a web-based survey. Of those, 498 (57%) responded. A further 57 people took the initiative to follow a link from IPGRI’s Web site to the survey.

In 2000, the United Nations adopted seven Millennium Development Goals in order to measure progress towards eradicating poverty. The new strategy paves the way for IPGRI to use its special expertise in agricultural diversity to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, especially those related to hunger and poverty eradication, maternal health and child mortality, and environmental sustainability.

This will be achieved through six interrelated areas of work.

IPGRI will work with partners to improve the common understanding of the social, economic and environmental benefits of agricultural diversity. To do this, it will be necessary to develop and improve methods for bringing farmers and others into the process of diagnosing problems and identifying opportunities and solutions.

“We will continue our work to ensure that all actors in the chain that links farmers to consumers get a fair reward from their efforts,” said Frison. “And we will forge links with non-governmental organizations, the private sector and others to do so. IPGRI recognizes that it is not a development agency. It will work with partners to ensure that the benefits of agricultural diversity can reach those that need them the most.”

Another area of work concerns the use of agricultural diversity, especially to develop more productive crops, farms and forest systems. This area of work encompasses techniques for monitoring the status of biodiversity in production systems and improved methods of on-farm conservation. It involves providing technical advice to local, national and international partners and the identification and

dissemination of best practices. IPGRI will support documentation systems and offer improved access to information as a global service. IPGRI also has a well-defined role in relation to improving the productivity of bananas and plantains, coconuts and cacao, and will strengthen and expand these efforts.

Much still needs to be done to study the impact of agricultural diversity on a range of pressing problems and to ensure that the results of such investigations are widely available. A third area of work will identify research needs in concert with partners and seek to influence the global agenda to recognize the value of agricultural diversity. The people who make use of agricultural diversity are themselves a source of valuable information and knowledge, and IPGRI will continue to support farmers and others to document, protect and disseminate their traditional knowledge about diversity.

“IPGRI’s approach ensures to work ensures that whatever we do, we not only carry out the tasks but also develop the capacity of our partners to do the work themselves,” said Frison. “Capacity development is thus an integral part of almost every activity IPGRI

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Diversity for well-being: IPGRI launches new strategy

IPGRI’s new strategy focuses on conserving and using crop diversity to improve the lives of people in poor countries.

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undertakes.” However it will also be an area of work in its own right, focusing in particular on opportunities to extend the institute’s reach. Among other activities, IPGRI will train trainers, support the inclusion of ideas about agricultural diversity in schools and universities, and support the training of individual scientists

It is vital that efforts to deploy agricultural diversity in support of better lives are not hampered by restrictive policies

or perverse economic incentives. IPGRI will work with countries to ensure that they can formulate, assess and implement policies that support the use of agricultural diversity. In the international arena, IPGRI will continue to provide impartial technical advice on genetic resources to FAO and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (see related story, p.20). IPGRI will also seek to promote policies that are supportive of biodiversity with regional and global bodies that have

an impact on farm and forest systems.

The single most important task for IPGRI, according to a stakeholder survey conducted during the process of developing the strategy, is to make people—especially decision-makers in the developing world—aware of the importance of agricultural diversity. Accordingly IPGRI will use all means at its disposal to ensure that the activities of its other five areas of work are given wide exposure.

“In this way,” said Frison, “we hope to awaken everyone, from highly-placed politicians to the rural people they serve, to the value of agricultural diversity for development and improved well-being.”

By Jeremy Cherfas, IPGRI

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Market in Khota Baru, Malaysia.

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After twenty-three years of war and Taliban rule, Afghanistan is starting to rebuild basic infrastructure that the West takes for granted. Fortunately, much of its historical heritage remains largely intact.

Although a Taliban presence remains in the south

and east of the country, conditions in the historic western city of Herat are relatively peaceful. As a desert oasis situated on several important trade routes, this city is known to be at least 2,500 years old, and was a major centre of Persian culture between the 11th and 16th centuries.

Today, the population is a mixture of Tajiks and a Hazara Mongol minority that was persecuted under the Taliban. Urban life resembles the European Middle Ages, with bustling streets where blacksmiths, sweet makers, silk weavers, carpenters and bakers ply their trades. Houses and shops are commonly made of mud brick.

Herat is an elegant city with massive pine trees cooling its streets and a university with a vibrant agriculture department. Heratis are proud of their intellectual traditions, their tombs and shrines of philosophers and their reputation for tolerance of racial, cultural and religious differences. Even during the time of the Taliban, women held discussions on philosophy and poetry, disguising themselves as a sewing circle.

Several crops are commonly grown in the Herat region, including an ancient wheat,

rockmelons, pistachios, alfalfa, apricots and almonds. This abundance is produced in an apparently denuded landscape through a combination of good soil, animal manure and spring water from the mountains. The manure of huge flocks of goats and sheep that graze the very low vegetation on the expansive plains is collected in night enclosures in the villages. Fresh water is led from springs along channels to the market gardens and orchards that surround the villages. These are all small scale, protected by high mud walls from animals and the prevailing high winds. However, it is the grapes, renowned for their taste and reputed to be the best in the world, that give Herat its fame.

The history of Herat’s grapes is shrouded in mystery, but it is hypothesized that around 2000 BC they may have been grown by the Aryans, a nomadic people who spread across Central Asia during this time. Later, the kingdom of Khorasan, with Herat as its capital, was well known for wine made from the Laal and Looghi Wine varieties. Laal are noted for their extreme sweetness, and Looghi Wine grapes are large, red and resilient to climatic extremes.

Locals claim that there are 100 different grape varieties in the Herat region. These are unique for several reasons, including their delicacy (they spoil within two days)–a challenge to growing them as an export crop. Some are best eaten fresh, while others are commonly dried. Up until the 1979 Afghan War, many grapes were dried for export in traditional drying houses. Today, some are exported to Russia to make wine, and others are reserved for the production of Herati vinegar. Some are specially adjusted to Herat’s harsh climate, and cannot survive in other Afghan provinces.

Herat experiences four months of dry winds from the north in summer, and a low precipitation concentrated in the winter months where temperatures drop below freezing. These challenges have led the local inhabitants to develop a unique growing method. To protect them from climatic extremes, grape vines are grown inside walled gardens with four-metre high mud walls, planted at the bottom of two metre deep-angled trenches and trained up sloping mud banks. Various flowers, herbs, and fruit trees including fig, apple, pear, pomegranate and plum are grown in a similar fashion around the vineyard.

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Grapes of Herat, Afghanistan

Herati farmers grow an abundance of crops in addition to grapes. Here, a farmer and his son show off their rockmelon harvest.

A Herati farmer poses with his grape drying tower.

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The Herat University has established a collection of grapes and several other fruits and nuts at its new farm, established in 2002. Students propagate local varieties of vegetables and fruits in the tens of thousands for dissemination to communities and the revegetation of public lands.

Over the last couple of years, a Kyoto-based Japanese development NGO called NICCO has been drawing on the expertise of Australia’s Seed Savers’ Network to help steer reconstruction in Herat along sustainable lines. Since 1979, NICCO has been helping the poor in developing countries to become economically and socially self-sustaining.

In Afghanistan, as in several other Asian countries, ancient irrigation channels called karez run as deep as twenty metres under the ground. Those in the vicinity of a village in the Herat area direct water from three springs in the mountains to irrigate village fields on the plains, enabling agriculture to succeed in an area with very little rainfall. One of NICCO’s major achievements has been to repair the karez, returning them to a functional state and facilitating vegetable and almond cultivation. Jude and Michel Fanton of

The Seed Savers' Network influenced karez design by encouraging that local native trees be planted along the channels.

Making two visits to Herat and the surrounding region over the last couple of years, Jude and Michel have been running sustainable agriculture courses for lecturers, and subsequently for students, at Herat University’s Faculty of Agriculture. Between January and September last year, a university farm glasshouse and tree nursery was planted with a thousand grapevines of five different varieties. Money was donated by Seed Savers to cover recording and. labelling costs.

Alerted by Seed Savers, the Slow Food Movement, which has focused much effort on protecting unique food varieties, is now considering working with Herati grape growers to help the region’s grape crop survive competition from large-scale industrial produce.

Challenged by war, the worst drought in decades

between 1999 and 2003, and flooding in January this year, the Heratis have become a resilient people. With the help of NGOs like NICCO, Seed Savers and Slow Food, the Heratis—and

their traditional grape varieties—can look forward to a more promising future.

By Jude Fanton and Martin Oliver, Seed Savers

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CONTACTSSeed Savers' NetworkPO Box 975Byron Bay, NSW 2481, AustraliaTel.: 61 2 6685 7560 / 6685 6624Email: jude@seedsavers.net Web site: www.seedsavers.net

Slow Food MovementVia Mendicità Istruita, 8, 12042 Bra (CN), ItalyTel.: +39 0172 419 611Email: international@slowfood.com Web site: www.slowfood.com

Nippon International Cooperation for Community Development (NICCO)101Nishirokkaku-cho,Rokkaku-Shinmachi-Nishiiru, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto, 604-8217 JAPANTel.: 81 75 241 0681 Fax: 81 75 241 0682Email: info@kyoto-nicco.orgWeb site: www.kyoto-nicco.org

Herat is well known for its remarkable grape diversity:

more than 100 varieties grow in the region. On the right is the

famous Laal variety.

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Patrick Maundu is an ethnobotanist who coordinates the African leafy vegetable programme at IPGRI. Patrick was born in Maweli, a rural village

in eastern Kenya. His community members, the Kamba, are traditionally livestock keepers and small-scale farmers as well as astute hunters. Like many

of his friends, he combined school work with livestock keeping and helping his parents grow food for the family. This is Patrick’s story:

“Livestock keeping was in the afternoons after school, weekends and during holidays. It involved grazing cattle in vast communal lands with other boys and eating mainly wild fruits, roots and tubers to supplement the evening meal, the only meal in the

day. During weekends and holidays, we took the animals about 15 km away for water. The animals knew the way and therefore we could take some time to eat wild fruits or to dig up edible roots. At home, cereals were grown together with pigeon peas and cowpeas, which provided protein. Cassava and sweet potatoes were always grown but mostly used only during times of food shortage. My mother collected over 15 different types of vegetables from the wild or on abandoned fields”.

“But this traditional life was not to last. Modernization,

including Christianization, was introduced to the region and swept like bush fire. Land tenure changed from communal to individual ownership through a process that saw the more influential farmers get the larger portions and neighbours and relatives turned enemies. This suddenly limited the freedom to graze anywhere and also to eat the huge variety of wild foods. Everything traditional began to be viewed as primitive and even against the teachings of Christianity. If a family remained so, it was branded a family of witches.

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Considered unfashionable and even shameful only a few years ago, traditional leafy vegetables have become exceptionally popular in Kenya and other sub-Saharan African countries. Crop diversity experts are helping dispel the colonial stigmatization of traditional vegetables and fostering a newfound appreciation of their high nutritional value and medicinal uses.

Sub-Saharan African contains an enormous variety of leafy vegetables, estimated to comprise between 800-1000 species.

In many parts of Africa, leafy vegetables are used as a side dish to accompany a type of thick gruel, called sima (or nsima) in East and Southern Africa and fufu in Central and West Africa. This gruel is made from cereal grains (such as maize, pearl millet, finger millet, or fonio), flour, or the dried ground starchy roots and tubers of cassava, potato or plantain. Leafy vegetables may also be mashed together with the starchy foods.

During the colonial era, African natives came to believe that their traditional foods, clothing, religions,

and medicine, were inferior to the new, “exotic” novelties brought by the colonial powers. They saw the foreign foods as symbols of class and modernity, and increasingly cultivated new crops such as spinach and cabbage at the expense of more traditional vegetables. Though urban populations had greater access to the new crops than rural people, the knowledge of traditional vegetables waned in many communities across sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, many affluent families in East and Southern Africa continue to consume the

less nutritious cabbage as a side dish. At the same time, in common with most regions of the world, the consumption of starchy and oily foods by both rural farmers and urban dwellers has increased. The result: a sharp reduction in the availability of traditional vegetables and the unique nutrients and micronutrients that they contain, and as a result, an increase in nutrition-related conditions such as diabetes, obesity and coronary diseases.

Since 1995, IPGRI, in partnership with the Dutch government, has led a

campaign to reverse this trend. The first phase, conducted in a number of sub-Saharan African countries, inventoried leafy vegetable species and identified the key issues hindering their cultivation, conservation and marketing. About 210 species were recorded in Kenya alone. Yet only about 10 of these found their way to markets, usually back-street markets frequented by a small number of regular customers.

The second phase of the campaign began in 2001. A variety of projects and activities have been

Traditional african leafy vegetables: From despised to prized

Patrick Maundu examines nightshade, one of the leafy vegetables now experiencing a resurgence in Kenya.

Early experience shapes ethnobotanist’s career

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supported in this phase, including collecting and analyzing samples of the most widely used leafy vegetables, such as amaranth, African nightshades, and cowpea. Other activities include nutritional and agronomic studies, distribution of seeds to farmers, and dissemination of local recipes featuring leafy vegetables.

Two important activities involve marketing and a major public awareness campaign. With additional support from the International Development

Research Centre in Canada, IPGRI worked with a marketing expert in Kenya who concluded that traditional leafy vegetables would attract new customers if they were given a higher profile and grown in clean conditions (some varieties are grown in sewage to take advantage of the nutrients in waste material).

With support and training from the project, farmers on the outskirts of Nairobi soon began growing leafy vegetables. Uchumi Supermarkets, the largest supermarket chain in Kenya, agreed to sell the

vegetables. The vegetables quickly became fashionable and shed their lower-class status; they are now the most consumed vegetables in the country.

The public awareness campaign helped to boost the popularity of leafy vegetables as well. Leaflets and posters show that traditional varieties have ten times the nutrients

as cabbage. Their many medicinal uses have also boosted the popularity of the vegetables. Television, radio, and newspaper campaigns have spread the good word widely, and two national food fairs in Kenya featuring traditional vegetables recently drew thousands of people.

It is a reality of life that

perception is often as important as fact. The campaign for traditional vegetables has taken advantage of both, resulting in their reinstatement as a valuable part of people’s diets throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

By Patrick Maundu, IPGRI

The veterinary clinic was two day’s journey away and the human clinic one day’s journey but my farther had to make the trip for drugs to treat diseases he could have easily treated with herbal medicines.”

“Peer pressure at school was also mounting. We were required to bring in our own lunches. Boys ate in separate groups. All food was shared and people ate each other’s food in turn. If your mother cooked cabbage (which was grown in urban areas at that time), you talked about it to the other boys and

it was a big delight when your turn came to share your food. If you brought traditional vegetables, you hid yourself over lunch hour to eat alone. My mother, like the other women, would sell her chicken and eggs so she could buy wheat-based products from the local trading centre such as scones and local buns called mandazi. This was the modern food.”

“My mother used to grow sorghum and pearl millet and had enough to feed our family of eight. She stopped growing these in favour of maize, which was

considered a modern crop. We could no longer pick wild vegetables as this was a sign of primitivism or extreme poverty. A few years later, the family was already starving. All the maize had dried up on the farm due to shortage of rain. My mother knew she would have harvested something if she had planted the more drought-resistant pearl millet instead of maize. But those were the times. The family had to pay the price by making the 10 km walk to the trading centre to get a government food ration or mwolyo.”

“I benefited a lot from

my early interaction with nature and this has shaped my career greatly. Within IPGRI, I promote the use of traditional vegetables, starting with urban dwellers. If they can be convinced, the rural folk would follow suit. I believe there are dozens of neglected foods that have potential for much wider consumption. These foods not only enhance dietary diversity and therefore nutrition and health, but can also improve incomes for small scale producers.”

“Now, many years later, my village still adores the cabbage and wheat

products, which it can not even produce since it is a dry area. Knowledge about traditional vegetables has been lost in many households. Dependence on market products is a drain to household finances. Most men have run away to towns for low-paying jobs, leaving the women behind to struggle on. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Traditional vegetables and other foods are now beginning to be accepted as foods for the elite as well,

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Kenyan woman harvesting a vegetable locally known as

Mtsunga or Launaea curnuta. This is the most important

vegetable in her community. It grows continuously on

cultivated lands.

For more information, contact Patrick Maundu (p.maundu@cgiar.org).

For more information, contact Patrick Maundu (p.maundu@cgiar.org).

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A simple solution is often invoked to help the world’s 800 million undernourished people: more food. But more food alone will not solve the crisis. People’s diets must be diverse enough to provide them with proper nutrition. The proponents of dietary diversity cite the importance of ensuring the continued availability of the crop diversity needed to provide malnourished people with a healthy diet.

Traditionally, rural communities in developing nations have adhered to diets incorporating local varieties that are often more nutritious and diverse than modern types. In Mali, for example, there is an association between a varied diet of local fruits and vegetables and adequate consumption of nutrients such as vitamins A and C.

In recent years there has been an alarming shift in diets around the world. Whereas the Western world—as evidenced by the success of organizations like the Slow Food Movement—has started to embrace traditional foods as part of a growing consciousness of better health, the developing world is actually shifting away from traditional diets in favour of the carbohydrate-based diets of developed nations. Refined carbohydrates, such as provided by wheat and rice, have become cheaper in developing nations as a result of reduced transportation costs, agricultural subsidies, and high-input agriculture. As a result, they are widely available, most noticeably in large cities. People in developing countries also often view traditional crops

as antiquated in comparison to the new, “modern” foods from the West.

The trend is termed “nutrition transition”, in which people simplify their diets and eliminate the diversity that has traditionally been a strong component of their food intake. “The problem is not the quantity of food that people eat,” said Dr Jeremy Cherfas, a science writer at IPGRI. “The big problem is the quality. By eating a more diverse diet, people get the nutrients they need for good health.”

Diets without proper nutrition can cause the phenomenon known as hidden hunger: a lack of the vitamins, nutrients, and minerals needed by the body. Hidden hunger can cause a variety of harmful health effects. A deficiency of vitamin A can cause blindness, while iron deficiencies result in a decrease in a body’s red blood cells, which leads to anaemia. The lack of proper nutrition has also been linked to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer, as well as to weakened immune systems.

Although there is a general tendency to associate such diseases with the affluent citizens of developed countries, the residents of developing countries with poor diets are at risk as well.

The solution to hidden hunger is to employ diversity as part of what is termed a “virtuous circle”. Perhaps the clearest example comes from the African leafy vegetable project coordinated by IPGRI. Myriad species of leafy vegetables—more than 200 in Kenya alone—have traditionally been used in local diets. Usually these species are more nutritious than “exotic” vegetables such as cabbage or carrots. They are generally grown by women in home gardens to feed their families. If a woman happens to grow a surplus, she can sell it and increase her income, which can then be used to buy medicines, education and other commodities. Public awareness of the value of leafy vegetables increases as more and more people buy them. This leads to increased conservation efforts and encourages farmers to grow more. Finally, everyone benefits from the nutrients found in the vegetables.

Marketing also benefits the urban poor. With the growth of peri-urban agriculture and a ready supply of traditional

foods, city dwellers gain access to fresh, high-quality local produce that is more nutritious and better for them. “One of the exciting aspects of this work is that it links people in rural areas to people in the city, and can improve all their lives,” said Dr Cherfas. When people see for themselves the benefits that a diverse diet brings and are given affordable access to the right foods, they adopt these foods, becoming healthier and more productive.

Feeding hungry people is not enough: they need to be fed well. Supporting dietary diversity will help millions of hungry people meet their nutritional needs while promoting the conservation of crop diversity throughout the developing world. As in the African leafy vegetable project, making people aware of the nutritional advantages of traditional species leads to increased conservation efforts and encourages farmers to continue to cultivate these local species. According to Cherfas, “That’s the ultimate win-win situation.”

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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Dietary diversity aids nutrition

A diet lacking in diversity can seriously damage human health.

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Quinoa and cañahua are highly nutritious cereal crops whose main centre of diversity is around Lake Titicaca, which is shared by Bolivia and Peru. The crops were widely cultivated in pre-Hispanic times but are now facing extinction.

A recent survey of 467 Bolivian households in the area surrounding the lake, conducted by the Fundación para la Promoción e Investigación de Productos Andinos (PROINPA), found that quinoa and cañahua ranked third in farmers’ preference after lima beans and oca. The households surveyed reported growing a total of 40 local varieties of

quinoa and 20 of cañahua.

The survey also revealed that 85% of the farmers only plant one variety and none of them grow more than four, an indication of the extent to which the diversity of quinoa and cañahua is decreasing in the region. The most popular quinoa and cañahua varieties are grown in 32% and 22% of the households, respectively.

Now, an annual diversity fair in Tiwanaku, Bolivia is helping to recover quinoa and cañahua diversity as well as the traditional knowledge held by the farmers who manage them. The fair is sponsored by

a project of IPGRI and the International Fund for Agricultural Development on neglected crops (see related story, p.40)

The fair is a place for farmers to show off and exchange their quinoa and cañahua varieties as well as traditional recipes. The annual event is also helping to improve the image of the crops among urban consumers and provides a means to judge the relative popularity of the various products on exhibit, an important indicator of the potential risk to the variety concerned.

The diversity fair promotes advances in the production and use of the crops, and strengthens links between producers, processors and markets. Showcasing processed products is increasing the value of Andean grains and promoting their consumption.

Planting, managing and using quinoa and cañahua diversity is the responsibility of women. Women decide which varieties to plant, taking into account taste and cooking characteristics. For this reason, women’s knowledge of the crops is quite specialized and their participation in the diversity fair crucial. Older women,

for example, have a great deal of knowledge to share concerning the medicinal and ritual uses of quinoa and cañahua.

Local authorities in Tiwanaku recently announced the decision to make the diversity fair an annual event, ensuring that these important but little known crops continue to gain exposure among rural and urban families.

By Margarita Baena, IPGRI

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Adding Value to Andean grains

Milled quinoa and cañahua can be used to prepare many dishes such as empanadas, cookies and cakes.

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For further information contact Wilfredo Rojas, Focal Point for Genetic Resources at PROINPA, Regional Altiplano (w.rojas@proinpals.org), José Luis Soto, Focal Point for Gender and Socioeconomic Issues in PROINPA, Regional Altiplano (jl.soto@proinpalp.org) or Wilfredo Marín, Director of Agronomy at the Tiwanaku Farmer Academic Unit of Universidad Católica Boliviana (wpmp74@hotmail.com).

A new facilitation unit for agricultural biodiversity is being established by the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). An international workshop recommended setting up the unit to promote and facilitate research collaboration worldwide so that biodiversity in agriculture can play a much

greater part in sustainable development. The move has been endorsed by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

“We are looking forward to demonstrating that agricultural diversity at all levels—from landscapes to microbes in the soil—can be harnessed to alleviate poverty and improve food security, and can do so in a sustainable manner,” said

Jane Toll, coordinator of SGRP and a co-organizer of the workshop.

Managing Agricultural Biodiversity for Sustainable Development was held in Nairobi, Kenya in October 2003. More than 60 participants from 35 countries attended the meeting, which took place in the week before the annual general meeting of the CGIAR.

The call for a facilitation unit was just one of the outcomes of the workshop. Participants also agreed on the need for immediate action to enhance the usefulness of agricultural biodiversity.

These include:■ Identifying agreed

methodologies to assess and monitor agricultural biodiversity.

■ Recognizing and strengthening the role of agricultural biodiversity in new farming practices.

■ Studying the part agricultural biodiversity can play in the rural-urban interface.

■ Identifying opportunities for intensification and agricultural diversity to be increased together

The workshop hoped to see the establishment of an agricultural biodiversity alliance for development, open to all.

“It’s a tall order,” said IPGRI’s Director General Emile Frison, “but if we are to help meet the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty and hunger in a sustainable manner by the year 2015, we are going to have to go beyond business as usual.”

There has been a massive increase in agricultural productivity over the past 30 years. Although the number of people alive on Earth has doubled since 1961, the food produced per person is 24% higher than it was then. By and large, this intensification has been accompanied by decreasing agricultural biodiversity. Farming systems, especially on good land, are simpler than they used to be. Highly-bred uniform varieties are grown as monocultures, often with irrigation and inputs of energy, fertilizers

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New unit to promote agricultural biodiversity

The injection of bees into agricultural systems enhancesproductivity by improving pollination of the crops. It also offers opportunities for farmers to earn income from honey and other products. ©

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and protective compounds. Unfortunately environmental degradation often goes with this intensification, which is ultimately unsustainable.

Agricultural biodiversity consists of all the elements involved in agricultural production systems—from genes to ecosystems. It includes crops, trees, fish and livestock and all interacting and associated species of pollinators, symbionts, pests, parasites and competitors.

Diversity can contribute crucial elements that people want from their farming systems and can do so sustainably. In Burkina Faso, farmers use a wide variety of indicators from the world around them—the croaking of frogs, or the nesting of birds—to determine when to sow seeds. Without those elements of unmanaged agricultural biodiversity, their harvests would be lower and less secure. In Syria and Lebanon, women have learned to look after bees. This injection of agricultural biodiversity not only enhances productivity generally, by improving pollination of the crops, it also offers the women a chance to earn a significant income from honey and other products. And of course there are examples from around the world of

farmers planting different varieties of the same crop that are suited to the different conditions of their fields, for example well-watered valley bottoms as opposed to dryer uplands.

As well as providing direct benefits to production, agricultural biodiversity can benefit the agricultural system’s general health. In particular, more diverse systems seem to be both more resistant to change and more stable. That is, the overall productivity of a more diverse system, one in which there are more varieties and more species, is less affected by sudden perturbations, such as an outbreak of disease or a failure of the rains. Furthermore, after a perturbation the productivity of the more diverse system returns to its average level more rapidly. Together these two qualities can mean that diverse systems are more stable; the variation in yield or income from year to year is lower.

Yet another potential benefit is adaptability. If there is a general trend towards, for example, lower rainfall, then a genetically uniform crop does not give the farmer much room to select better-adapted individuals to track the changing environment. Diversity supplies the

genetic variability that artificial selection by people requires.

“Our opportunities to enhance livelihoods through the improved use of agricultural diversity have been limited by our lack of understanding of the underlying causes of the loss of diversity and the consequences of such loss for the functioning of agricultural ecosystems”, said Toll. “And assessments of the various components of diversity are conducted separately; there has been no integrated assessment of agricultural biodiversity as a whole”.

Of the meeting’s many outputs, perhaps the most far-reaching will be the decision to establish some kind of facilitation mechanism to take the work forward. Presented to the 7th meeting of COP in Malaysia in February 2004, the plan received a ringing endorsement.

“By the end of 2004,” said Toby Hodgkin, Principal Scientist at IPGRI and one of the workshop organizers, “we should have a much clearer idea of exactly how the facilitation unit will operate. Eventually, we hope to ensure that the contribution agricultural biodiversity can make to

sustainable development is more widely appreciated and understood.”

By Jeremy Cherfas, IPGRI

For further information, contact Jane Toll (j.toll@cgiar.org) or Toby Hodgkin (t.hodgkin@cgiar.org).

The meeting papers are available at http://sgrp.cgiar.org/agrobiodiversityworkshop.html

Not far from Bangalore, a cluster of villages nestle between the hillocks, sheltered from the hustle and bustle of India’s global high tech capital. The lives of the farming communities that inhabit these villages revolve around biodiversity and the traditional practices and customs passed from parent to child over the generations. GREEN (Genetic Resource, Energy, Ecology and Nutrition) Foundation is working with the villagers to ensure that the age-old relationship between farmers and their crops is not threatened by the country’s economic

boom and pressures to modernize agriculture at the expense of knowledge and traditions that are literally priceless.

The villagers organize the farming year according to an agricultural calendar that follows the movement of 27 stars. According to the calendar, the growing season starts with the ashwini rains in May. This is when farmers begin preparing the land.

With the coming of the krithika and rohini rains, the farmers begin to plant their crops. Food reserves—for humans and for livestock—are at their lowest during the growing season. As a result, the entire community depends heavily on the edible green plants that can be found in abundance in the fields and forests following the heavy rains. Many of these are considered unproductive weeds by modern agriculture.

With the advent of dodda asalai Male (the big rains) in July, the farmers plant ragi (also known as finger millet) by scattering seeds in an arc. Mustard, sorghum, field bean, cowpea, pigeon pea and a range of minor millets are mixed together in different proportions and planted in rows using a saddike, a hollow bamboo pipe. The planting only starts after a pooja—a celebration complete with offerings to nature—has been performed in the field.

GREEN Foundation is a non-governmental organization based in southern India. The foundation is working with people across the state of Karnataka to conserve and promote local knowledge and the traditional crop varieties that are so important to the rich cultures to be found here. Working through a network of women's farming groups called sanghas, GREEN Foundation has created farmer-based community seed supply systems and has helped to establish 31 community seed banks. As a result, the number of farmers

in Karnataka conserving indigenous seeds has grown from 10 to over 1 500 today. GREEN Foundation was awarded the 2004 UNDP Equator Initiative Award in recognition of its outstanding work towards poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation.

By Vanaja Ramprasad, GREEN Foundation

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Geneflow NewsThe GREEN Foundation: supporting traditional agriculture in India

Participatory characterization of sorghum varieties in a south

Indian village.

Field planted with a traditional Sorghum variety.

© Didier BAZILE (Agroécologue, GREEN / Ressources Renouvelables et Viabilité,

CIRAD-TERA, Bamako)

Visit the GREEN Foundation Web site at http://www.greenconserve.com

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Special Section

Start with a seed

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The stories in the following pages treat a wide range

of subjects, from ex situ conservation technologies to

the cultural importance of particular crops. However,

a common thread connects them all: the Global Crop

Diversity Trust. The Trust is a new international fund

that aims to ensure that the world’s most important

crop diversity remains available to use in ensuring

our health, nutrition and food security. The stories

describe the relationships between people and their

crops—specifically the crops that are most crucial

to global food security—and the measures that are

being taken around the world to ensure that these

relationships can continue to prosper and grow.

Cover Photo© Giacomo Pirozzi/Panos PicturesYoung boy helping withthe family's wheat harvest. Lesotho

The world’s collections of crop diversity underpin food security and have a vital role to play in poverty eradication and environmental renewal. Today, there are nearly 1500 such collections around the world, 65% of them in poor countries that can ill afford the costs of maintaining them. Given the immense and complex challenges of our modern age, it is unthinkable that we should let this critical global resource slip through our fingers for lack of a stable funding source.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is an international fund whose goal is to support the conservation of crop diversity over the long term. The Trust will help salvage the world’s most important crop diversity collections and guarantee their ongoing healthy and safe management. Many of these collections are at

grave risk due to a lack of ongoing support. And the continuing erosion of crop diversity in the field means that the material they contain may no longer be available anywhere else. The Trust will be a source of long-term financial support to ensure that the collections remain useful and continue to be available to farmers and breeders today and long into the future.

The Trust will host a $US 260 million endowment whose proceeds will provide a permanent source of financial support for the development and maintenance of a rational, efficient and effective global arrangement for crop diversity conservation around the world. Funds will be provided to support the operational costs of maintaining the world’s most important collections and to provide technical and

capacity building assistance to important collections in need.

The Trust is being established through a partnership of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) acting on behalf of the 15 Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on International Research (CGIAR).

The Trust will work to conserve the diversity of those crops that feed the most people, such as wheat and rice; major food crops for the poor such as cassava, millet, and cowpea; and forage crops for livestock. These are the crops that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture states are the most vital for ensuring global food security (see related story, p.20).

There are plans to continue to build the endowment over time, to an ultimate goal

of $1 billion. If that occurs, it will then be possible to expand the range of crops, the number of collections and the activities supported by the Trust.

The Trust is being established by an Interim Panel of Eminent Experts (IPEE), which was put into place by FAO and the Future Harvest Centres for that purpose. The Trust will be an independent international fund under the terms of an Establishment Agreement that was adopted by the IPEE in October 2003.

The Trust is an element of the funding strategy of the International Treaty. It will operate under the policy guidance of the Governing Body of the Treaty.

The Trust is being established specifically to fund ex situ conservation. The maintenance of ex situ collections, in particular, requires a stable, sustainable and perpetual funding stream. The Trust’s endowment mechanism is ideally suited to meet this requirement.

The work of the Trust relates directly to two of the eight Millennium Development Goals:

■ Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

■ Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

The Trust's work also contributes to the aims of the Convention on Biological Diversity: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from its use. In addition, the Trust will implement the pledge made by countries at the the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity.

by Ruth Raymond, IPGRI

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Introduction to the Global Crop Diversity Trust

His Excellency Mr. Tau'ili'ili Uili Meredith, Ambassador of Samoa to Italy signs the international agreement to establish the Global Crop Diversity Trust as an independent international fund. Samoa is one of the founder governments of the Trust.

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For more information, visit the Web Site of the Global Crop Diversity Trust at www.startwithaseed.org or contact Ruth Raymond (r.raymond@cgiar.org).

Ambassador Fernando Gerbasi, Chair of the Interim Panel of

Eminent Experts.

Genebanks around the world are soon to enter a new era of stable and secure funding. The Global Crop Diversity Trust, a permanent fund for crop diversity conservation, is rapidly becoming a reality.

Unlike other conservation funds, which tend to favour support for nature reserves or on-farm conservation (also known as in situ conservation), the Trust will focus exclusively on ex situ conservation. “Ex situ conservation serves a totally different function than in situ,” said Dr Geoffrey Hawtin, Interim Executive Secretary of the Trust. “In situ projects work with farmers to ensure the conservation of a whole cropping or farming system. But farming systems are dynamic and they change over time as farmers make choices about the crops and crop varieties they grow and eat. It is simply not reasonable to expect farmers to continue to grow a variety that no longer meets his or her needs for the sake of conservation alone. That’s when ex situ conservation becomes important. Placing samples of farmers’ varieties, or material gathered from the wild, where it also may be at risk for a number of reasons,

into a genebank ensures that the material will be still be available in the future.”

Despite the importance of ex situ conservation, international funding for crop diversity collections has not been easy to find. “International funds for conservation come largely from development agencies,” explained Hawtin, “and such agencies generally demand immediate impacts on rural poverty. Much less attention is paid to building up natural capital for the future. Ex situ conservation is not so immediately engaging because it doesn’t directly involve small farmers to the extent that in situ does. Ex situ conservation is a long-term process that requires a long-term commitment.”

The public perception of conservation is also important. “A lot of funding is driven by nostalgia,” explained Hawtin. “There is a widespread feeling that modern agriculture is bad and traditional agriculture is good. On-farm conservation projects are more likely to be closely linked with traditional knowledge and methods, while genebanks are often seen to represent the technological advances of modern agriculture.

The truth is not so black and white. Plant breeding, whether by farmers or by modern breeders, will always require access to crop diversity, which is available in many cases in the genebank alone. The fact that this diversity has been studied, documented, comes with a good guarantee of clean health and is available throughout the year makes it all the more useful.”

The Trust will address the most pressing concern of genebanks: ensuring that funding constraints do not put the collections at risk. “Our first task is to stabilize the situation,” said Hawtin. “The top priority is to makes sure that material in the genebank isn't lost. Thus, at

least initially, we will not fund significant new collecting, nor will we focus on detailed evaluation of material or on pre-breeding.”

All beneficiaries of the Trust will have to demonstrate their commitment to long-term conservation by providing a continuing contribution to the costs of managing the collection in their care. “While in general the Trust will cover a larger portion of the costs of poor collections, all will be required to contribute something,” said Hawtin. “Collection holders will be expected to at least maintain their current

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An interview with the Chief Executive of the Global Crop Diversity Trust

Dr Geoffrey Hawtin is leading the initiative to establish the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

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funding levels.” Trust grantees must also ensure that their collections are easily accessible to farmers, breeders, and researchers. “The Trust’s goals go far beyond conservation,” he continued. “We will require grant recipients to ensure that the accessions and the information about them are readily available. We will not measure success by the number of accessions conserved but by how many are getting out into the field or are being used by breeders and farmers, and the impact that this is having on poverty, food security and the environment.”

The Trust set strict requirements for its establishment, requiring seven signatures from five regions and at least four developing countries. Hawtin explained that, “this will help show a broad spread of support from the beginning, including the support of developing countries which are potential beneficiaries.” The Trust also plans to sign a Relationship Agreement with the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources some time next year. “The Trust is an element of the Treaty’s funding strategy and the Governing Body will provide it with policy

guidance,” Hawtin said. “The relationship with the Treaty and its Governing Body is crucial to the work of the Trust.”

Because of its exclusive focus on conservation, the Trust does not take a position on genetic modification. “You need a source of genes no matter what method of breeding you use,” explained Hawtin. “We’re not going to withhold material from someone because they’re using a particular breeding method—that’s the responsibility and the decision of the breeder or, ultimately, of society at large. Whether you are pro- or anti-genetic modification, you still need genebanks.”

The Trust is making progress towards its initial goal of raising an endowment of US$260 million—the amount that is required to secure the diversity of all crops covered by the multilateral system established under the International Treaty. It is also raising funds to support upgrading and capacity building for particularly needy genebanks. “Once we reach our initial goal,” said Hawtin, “I would like to see the Trust expand its coverage to all plant genetic resources for food and

agriculture and to additional value-adding activities such as pre-breeding. But the most important thing is to stabilize the existing collections of the crops in the multilateral system. To do more, we’ll need more money.” The Trust hopes to provide the first upgrading and capacity building grants before the end of 2004.

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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For more information on the Global Crop Diversity Trust, visit www.startwithaseed.org or contact Ruth Raymond (r.raymond@cgiar.org)

A crop genebank is a facility for conserving and distributing the diversity of crop varieties and their wild relatives. Genebanks range from massive collections stored in elaborate buildings to a simple field of a few labeled plants. They may conserve the diversity of a single species and its wild relatives, for example the 80 000 or more samples of rice and its relatives, gathered from around the world and maintained by the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Or it could be small collections of local fruit trees like those being assembled by schoolchildren in Sarawak, Indonesia.

One reason to conserve crop diversity in genebanks is that it is under threat elsewhere. Habitats continue to be destroyed and with the habitats go the plants. One of the main threats to crop diversity is modern agriculture. As new varieties are taken up by farmers because they offer genuine benefits, they may displace the diversity that was there before. This is especially ironic because all plant breeding is built on existing crop diversity, which makes it imperative that this diversity be conserved and remain available somewhere. Crop diversity, once lost, is impossible to replace.

Meeting the needs of plant breeders is an important—

often the primary—function of genebanks. But increasingly, genebanks are fulfilling additional roles. In many parts of the world, close links are being forged between genebanks and rural communities. Genebanks provide safe havens for a community’s traditional varieties and provide farmers with material adapted to their needs or that they can experiment with. In the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters, genebanks are a repository not only of the seeds farmers need, but also of the essential skills and knowledge needed to help to put agriculture back on its feet as quickly as possible.

Many of the world’s most valuable food crops—including wheat, rice, maize and many pulses—produce seeds that are relatively easy to store. For conservation purposes, the seeds are cleaned, dried, and placed in a sealed jar or packet. For medium term storage (20 to 30 years), the seeds are maintained at a temperature of about 5°C. For long-term storage (up to 100 years or even more) they are kept in cold rooms, or even domestic deep freezers, at –18°C to –20°C.

Even under the best storage conditions, the ability of the seeds to germinate declines over time so they must be planted out every few years

to provide a fresh stock. In addition, seed stocks have to be replenished to meet the demand of breeders, farmers and other users of the collection. The plants need to be cultivated carefully in environments to which they are well adapted and in the case of cross-pollinated species, such as maize, the plants must be isolated so that they do not pick up pollen from any surrounding plants and so become genetically 'contaminated'.

Other crops are more difficult to conserve. Potatoes, yams and cassava, for example, are not generally propagated by seed but are grown from tubers or other plant parts. The storage organs of such crops may be kept under cool conditions and at an appropriate humidity. But they take up much more space than seed, and must be regenerated (replanted) much more frequently, making it considerably more expensive to conserve such crops than those that can be stored as seeds.

Alternatively, root and tuber crops, as well as crops that do not produce seed at all (such as banana and plantain), or that produce seed that dies when it is dried and cooled (such as many tropical fruit species), can be maintained as living collections of plants growing in the field; these are called

field genebanks. However, such collections are very susceptible to natural hazards—pests, diseases and adverse weather—and it is desirable to also maintain them in more protected conditions.

Thus collections of crops that cannot be stored as seed, are often maintained as tissues or plantlets grown on a special nutrient gel in test tubes or Petri dishes. These are kept in chambers that maintain temperature and light conditions that are optimal for conservation—a system known as in vitro conservation. In addition, it is becoming more and more possible to store cells or plant tissues for long periods by cryopreservation, a specialized form of freezing in liquid nitrogen at temperatures between –86°C and –196° C (see related story, p. 28). But as the technical complexity of conservation increases, so does the cost.

by Ruth Raymond, IPGRI

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An introduction to genebanks

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An important resource for both in situ and ex situ conservation may be closer than you think. Home gardens play a significant role in the supply of food, home remedies and a range of handy products to people in rural areas worldwide. Awareness of the fact that the genetic diversity in home gardens is unique has led scientists to study this special agro-ecosystem with the intention of better understanding its role in the conservation and management of diversity. The Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) and IPGRI undertook the task of studying the diversity of home gardens in Cuba and Guatemala.

Home gardens are a dynamic way to maintain the diversity of plant species. From a conservation perspective, information on the extent and structure of diversity in home

gardens and knowledge of its changes over time is essential to understanding the genetic consequences of farmers’ practices and the effects of random events taking place in cultivated populations.

A number of species, that are typically grown in home gardens, were chosen in each country. Peppers and lima beans were two of those selected. The assessment of genetic variation in these species was accomplished through traditional analysis of morphologic characteristics, ethnology, soil type and condition, and cultural roles of the species. In addition, researchers used a molecular marker technology, known as amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP). Molecular markers allow the analysis of genetic diversity at the most basic level of the DNA molecule, which bears and transfers heritable

information from generation to generation.

The analysis of Guatemalan peppers compared the diversity of 34 samples collected in home gardens in the Department of Alta Verapaz with 30 pepper samples held in the national genebank. The genebank samples had been collected from 13 departments throughout the country. The results showed that the diversity of peppers in home gardens of Alta Verapaz to be equivalent to that in the national collection.

Lima beans are very important in the Cuban diet. Over the last decade, the national lima bean collection has almost vanished. The economic situation of the country led to a lack of electrical power in conservation facilities and inadequate regeneration of material in the field. To recover the national collection, researchers evaluated the lima bean diversity still present in home gardens. Sixty lima bean samples were collected from 25 home gardens throughout the north, east and central regions of Cuba. The samples represented three of the four lima bean types existing on the island

(Sieva, Sieva-Potato, and Potato; a fourth type, Big Lima, was not included). Results of the study showed that the three types were comparable in terms of genetic diversity and that there was no variation pattern that differentiated among geographical regions. However, molecular markers were able to differentiate the three groups of beans in terms of their genetic composition. The presence of multiple genetic compositions should be the basis for collecting the genetic resources of lima beans from home gardens for the restoration of the ex situ collection.

Molecular technology is vastly increasing the ability of scientists to analyze genetic diversity. In fact, the identification of pepper diversity in Guatemala and the evaluation of lima bean diversity in Cuba would never have been possible with traditional data. In the case of Guatemala, the fact that the gardens of Alta Verapaz collectively hold the same range of diversity of peppers as are held in the national genebank indicates that this is the minimum range of diversity that should be held ex situ. And in Cuba, knowledge of the lima bean diversity held in home gardens will facilitate the development of a technically sound strategy for restoring the national collection.

The use of molecular

analysis to study the genetic diversity of plants grown in home gardens opens up a whole new world of possibilities for developing complementary conservation strategies in which both on-farm and ex situ conservation have a role to play. While focusing its support on ex situ collections, the Global Crop Diversity Trust strongly supports such complementary strategies. And the potential of molecular technology to assist in the analysis of genetic diversity makes it a major tool in rationalization of crop diversity collections around the world, a major goal of the Trust.

By Félix Alberto Guzmán and M. Carmen de Vicente,

IPGRI

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Linking In Situ and Ex Situ Conservation through home gardens

The diversity of peppers grown in Guatemalan home gardens rivals that of the national collection.©

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After seven long and often arduous years of negotiations, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture came into force on 29 June 2004. At its centrepiece is a multilateral system for the exchange of plant resources, regarded by governments as a major step forward in the global fight for food security.

"The multilateral system is a unique and innovative aspect of the Treaty, “said Jose Esquinas-Alcázar, Secretary of FAO's Intergovernmental Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. “The system ensures the use of plant genetic resources based on the principle of easy access and exchange, and the fair and equitable sharing of the

benefits. The multilateral system covers 35 food crops and 29 forage crops. They represent most of the crops that humanity depends on for its food supply”.

Twelve years ago, the Convention on Biological Diversity made progress in establishing mechanisms to protect the world’s biodiversity and ensure that any benefits arising from the

use of biodiversity would be shared with the country of origin. But the Convention stopped short of dealing with the special situation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, the province of the FAO Commission.

“Due to their history, plant genetic resources for food and agriculture are in a class of their own,” said Ambassador Fernando Gerbasi, who chaired the negotiations of the Treaty. Ambassador Gerbasi also chairs the Interum Panel of Eminent Experts of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. “First, they depend on human intervention for their existence. Farmers have been domesticating wild plants through selection and breeding for ten thousand years. Farmers need these resources if they are to continue to develop crops that meet their own special needs and circumstances. Second, plant genetic resources for food and agriculture have been freely exchanged across continents and regions

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The International Treaty recognizes the enormous contribution that farmers and their communities have made and continue to make to the conservation and development of crop diversity.

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for centuries. As a result, almost all of the countries in the world are now heavily dependent on crops from other parts of the globe. This is why the multilateral system is so vitally important”.

The funding strategy of the International Treaty anticipates the mobilization of financial resources for crop diversity projects and programmes to help farmers, particularly in developing countries and countries in transition. The Global Crop

Diversity Trust is one element of this funding strategy. The Trust is an independent international endowment fund seeking to raise US$ 260 million from governments, foundations, and the private sector. Its goal is to salvage the world’s most important collections of crop diversity and provide them with the ongoing funding required to ensure their long term survival (see related stories, p.15, 16 and 23).

“There is a close relationship between the International

Treaty and the Trust,” said Geoff Hawtin, Interim Executive Secretary of the Trust. “The Trust will operate within the framework of the Treaty. The Governing Body of the Treaty will provide the Trust with policy guidance and will appoint four members to the Trust’s Executive Board. The International Treaty is incredibly important to humanity’s future. The Trust is one way to give its implementation some teeth.”

By Cassandra Moore, IPGRI

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Breadfruit Asparagus

Oat

Beet

Brassica (includes oilseed and vegetable crops such as cabbage, rapeseed, mustard, cress, rocket, radish, and turnip) Pigeon Pea

Chickpea

Citrus Coconut

Major aroids (include taro, cocoyam, dasheen and tannia)

Carrot

Yams

Finger Millet

Strawberry

Sunflower

Food crops included inthe multilateral system

The multilateral system also includes 29 legume, grass and other forage species.

For more information on the International Treaty, visit http://www.fao.org/ag/cgrfa/ itpgr.htm

Modern plant breeding is sometimes depicted as a coin with two faces. While it can provide solutions to the problems of farmers throughout the world, plant breeding has also been cited as the enemy of crop diversity. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, or CIMMYT, has faced both sides of the argument during its long involvement in wheat research. “The wheat varieties developed by CIMMYT and its partners starting in the 1940s have been incredibly successful, in the sense that they cover more than 75% of the wheat-growing area in developing countries,” said Marilyn Warburton, a molecular geneticist at CIMMYT. “But some feel that this achievement is not a success from a crop diversity standpoint.”

The concern was that the popular CIMMYT-related varieties had narrowed the diversity of wheat in farmers’ fields. All over the world, farmers replaced their landraces with the new types, which had higher, more dependable yields and better disease resistance. “Landraces are traditional varieties of wheat that evolved and were domesticated by farmers under a wide range of conditions over millennia,” explained Maarten van Ginkel, head of CIMMYT’s wheat genebank. “They’re

far more genetically diverse than the subset of improved wheats that were the basis of CIMMYT’s breeding programme over the past fifty years. You see an even broader range of diversity in the wild relatives of wheat, such as the grass species that evolved along with wheat.”

Genetic uniformity carries many risks. It offers diseases and pests a large window of opportunity. The disease pathogen that overcomes the resistance of genetically similar varieties grown over a large area can destroy crops on a wide scale. In contrast, a mosaic of genetically diverse varieties growing in farmers’ fields can buffer the effect of evolving pathogens, pests, and other stresses. Pathogens and pests in particular find it difficult to adapt to the varied kinds of genetic resistance they encounter across all of those varieties.

So how diverse are CIMMYT varieties and does their wide use pose a hazard for households in developing countries? This question was investigated by Warburton and Pingzhi Zhang of CIMMYT, along with Susanne Dreisigacker, Jochen Reif, and Albrecht Melchinger of the University of Hohenheim, Germany. They used molecular markers to study the diversity of wheat landraces from around the world, as

well as the CIMMYT-related wheats released in the past fifty years and the latest breeding lines. They found that the latest CIMMYT-related varieties and breeding lines are nearly as diverse as wheat landraces.

The researchers observed a big spike in diversity in the 1990s. “Starting in the 1970s, CIMMYT used landraces and wild relatives of wheat in its crosses,” explained Warburton. “The results showed up in modern varieties starting in the 1980s.”

Aside from accessions of wheat developed by CIMMYT, the institute’s genebank has about 80,000 accessions of wheat collected from around the world, including important landraces and wild relatives, according to van Ginkel. Breeders use the landraces in some

of their crosses to obtain valuable traits. For example, CIMMYT researcher Abdul Mujeeb-Kazi crossed a wild relative of wheat with durum wheats to replicate the spontaneous natural cross that produced bread wheat some 8,000 years ago. The resulting wheat, along with crosses based on other wild grasses, has brought the wild relatives’ diversity into the mainstream breeding programme. These new wheats contain novel diversity that can withstand more than 15 different stresses, including diseases, drought, salinity, and heat. The variation provided by these sources can be seen not just in the field but also at the molecular level.

All materials developed by CIMMYT are freely available to users worldwide. Using the material can bring the enormous diversity from the genebank back to farmers’

fields. “That’s our job in the genebank and as wheat researchers,” said van Ginkel. “We don’t just keep seeds frozen in storage. We find useful, diversity in the collections and work with our partners to deliver it to farmers’ fields.”

Important collections of wheat held in national and international genebanks (such as the international collection held by CIMMYT) are eligible for funding by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

By Kelly Cassaday, CIMMYT

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CIMMYT’s genebank helps restore wheat diversity to farmers’ fields

For more about CIMMYT, visit www.cimmyt.org

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Given that there are nearly 1500 genebanks around the world, the majority of which could undoubtedly argue their importance and neediness, a mechanism is needed for determining just how the Global Crop Diversity Trust will apportion its relatively modest funds to crop collections. As it turns out, the chief goal of the Trust supplies just such a mechanism.

The Trust aims to support an efficient and effective arrangement for the ex situ conservation of the most important crop collections around the world. It is the Trust’s vision that such an arrangement will comprise collections that together cover the majority of the genepool of the crops concerned and are accessible under the terms of the International Treaty with respect to access and benefit-sharing. Under such an arrangement, the collections are managed according to the scientific and technical standards needed to ensure their long-term conservation. They are well documented and the information about them is freely and widely available. The material in the collections is duplicated in at least one other location for safety but excessive duplication is avoided. The collections are managed within the context of a rational arrangement where resources and responsibilities are shared among the institutions concerned.

The collections that will be supported by the Trust are located in developing countries throughout the world, and, in particular, in regions where the crops originated and where their greatest genetic diversity can be found. These regions include the Andes, the neo-tropics of Central and South America, Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Many of the international collections held by the Future Harvest Centres are eligible for funding.

A first filter for determining whether specific collections should receive funding is provided by the eligibility principles of the Trust. Meeting these principles is the minimum requirement for a collection to receive support. Eventually, the principles will need to be approved by the Executive Board (which will replace the Interim Panel of Eminent Experts in 2005) of the Trust, following consultations with the Governing Body of the International Treaty and the Trust’s Donor Council. In the meantime and until the Trust’s permanent governance structures have been formally established, the following interim principles will apply:

■ The plant genetic resources are of crops included in Annex 1 or referred to in Article 15.1 (b) of the International Treaty

■ The plant genetic resources are accessible under the internationally agreed terms of access and benefit sharing provided for in the multilateral system as set out in the International Treaty

■ Each holder of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture commits to its long term conservation and availability

■ Each recipient of funds from the Trust shall undertake to work in partnership with the aim of developing an efficient and effective global conservation system

The principles are further elaborated by a set of criteria that must be met before a collection will be considered for long-term conservation support. “In the main, the criteria relate to the commitment and ability of the collection to meet the scientific and technical standards of management required by the Trust,” said Dr Geoff Hawtin, the Trust’s Interim Executive Secretary. “Two other very important criteria require that the collection holder is willing to share resources and conservation responsibilities with other institutions and that there is a strong link between the grantee genebank and users, including plant breeders and farmers.”

In cases where a collection meets the eligibility

principles but is unable to meet all of the criteria, the Trust can help. “We realize that many if not most of the priority collections will be unable to meet the criteria right away,” said Hawtin. “In that case, the Trust will consider providing upgrading and capacity building support specifically targeting areas needing improvement in order that the criteria can be met.”

The Trust will not have sufficient resources to support all eligible collections. The intention is to fund a relatively small number of collections: those that meet the principles and criteria and are in need of urgent support. There is the potential for collaborators to receive some funding however, in return for providing conservation services on a contractual basis, for example regeneration or documentation services.

The Trust has initiated a process of consultations and studies that will result in regional and crop conservation strategies to guide the allocation of resources to the most important and needy crop diversity collections. “The process is bringing together crop diversity managers and other experts to develop and implement the most cost efficient and effective arrangements for conserving key collections, from both a crop and a regional perspective,” said

IPGRI’s Jane Toll, who is coordinating the strategy development process.

In addition to identifying the most important crop diversity collections in the world, the conservation strategies will recommend upgrading and capacity building actions needed in order for these collections to meet the Trust’s criteria for long term conservation support.

“The process is underway to develop strategies for Central Asia and the Caucasus, East, West and Southern Africa, West Asia and North Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific,” said Toll. “And crop strategies are currently being developed for rice, wheat, rye, triticale, maize, sorghum, barley, coconut, banana, taro, yam, breadfruit and apple. The strategies will be produced by the people they will impact the most—collection holders and crop experts.”

The Trust expects to have completed all of the regional and crop strategies (covering 35 food species and 29 forage species) by the end of 2006. The first capacity building and upgrading grants will be awarded before the end of 2004.

by Ruth Raymond, IPGRI

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The conservation strategies

For more information, contact Jane Toll (j.toll@cgiar.org).

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Farmers and government researchers are coming together in Mali to conserve and cultivate the nation’s crop diversity. By involving farmers in a variety of research projects, Mali is ensuring that the conservation and use of crop diversity focus squarely on farmers’ needs.

Mali’s crop diversity collection is housed in six centres, each of which operates one or more research stations. The centres are maintained by the Institute of Rural

Economy (known by its French acronym IER) of the Ministry of Agriculture. The Institute and its genetic resources unit work closely with farmers on a variety of breeding, collecting, and knowledge-sharing projects.

The partners commonly use participatory research approaches. These take place in the context of projects supported by international institutions such as IPGRI, FAO, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Through these projects,

farmer field meetings and diversity seed fairs bring together farmers, researchers, and breeders to share knowledge and to exchange plant resources. These meetings and fairs take place regularly in villages throughout the country.

IER also works with farmers through its national research programme. For example, Mali’s agricultural extension service regularly holds meetings with both farmers and researchers to discuss farming problems and to look for solutions together. One result has been the development of improved crop varieties by Mali’s National Sorghum Programme, for example the sorghum type called “Tiematieteli.” The Institute also supports the development of crop-specific farming techniques. Material is developed and tested in research stations as well as in farmers’ fields where participatory plant breeding and varietal selection take place. Participatory plant breeding involves farmers in the selection of crop traits and is often linked to efforts to conserve traditional varieties on-farm.

Mali has plans to establish a national long term storage facility and the capacity to conduct more research and breeding activities.

Duplicates of the material housed in the six centres will serve as the base for this national collection. Even while it works to centralize and upgrade its capacity to conserve and use crop diversity, Mali will continue to place a significant priority on meeting farmers’ needs.

“Today, many genebanks are beginning to see their role changing from simply providing conservation services to actively engaging with farmers to discover their needs and o work with them to ensure that those needs can be met,” said Dr Ehsan Dulloo, IPGRI’s Ex Situ Conservation Officer. “The Mali case is a good example of how such a relationship can benefit both sides.”

The existence of strong links to breeders, farmers and other users is one of the criteria that genebanks will need to meet to be eligible for long term conservation funding by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

By Agnes Fonteneau, Ehsan Dulloo, IPGRI and

Amadou Sidibé, Head, Unité des Ressources

Génétique, Mali

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Linking farmers and genebanks in Mali

The Institute of Rural Economy is working with farmers to help

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Outbreaks of grassy stunt virus once ruined rice harvests and brought hardship to poor farmers in South and Southeast Asia. Today, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and its national partners are developing commercial rice varieties resistant to the virus. This resistance is “borrowed” from a wild cousin of cultivated rice that may no longer exist in nature.

IRRI uses a breeding method called wide crossing, so named because of the large genetic gap separating two parental lines. Early successes in wide crossing show the potential benefits

of tapping wild species for desirable traits. “Wild species themselves are agronomically very poor,” explained Dr Darshan Brar, a rice breeder in IRRI’s Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biochemistry Division. “For example, they may be low yielding or have seeds that fall off the plant before maturity. But they may have unique properties like resistance to diseases or tolerance to environmental stresses. We want to introduce those kinds of traits from the wild species into cultivated rice so that the cultivated rice will have stronger resistance to a particular stress.”

“We screened 7000 rice lines for resistance to grassy stunt virus,” said Dr Brar. “Fortunately, a wild rice line of Oryza nivara from India was found to be resistant.” In 1974, three varieties of rice with grassy stunt resistance derived from O.

nivara were released. “It’s a classic example of a gene that wasn’t available in cultivated rice being taken from wild rice,” said Dr Brar. “It has had a major impact on our ability to develop improved varieties.”

In addition to grassy stunt resistance, scientists have transferred resistance to the debilitating bacterial blight, blast, and tungro diseases to cultivated varieties. Scientists use molecular marker technology to examine the DNA of crossed plants and determine whether a specific trait has been inherited. A wide-crossed tungro-resistant variety called Matatag 9 has been released in the Philippines, as has a variety containing a gene from a wild species that is resistant to all nine prevalent races of bacterial blight. Wide crossing has also produced rice varieties resistant to brown planthopper, the

insect also transmits grassy stunt virus. Four such varieties have been released in Vietnam.

These successes illustrate the need to conserve the world’s crop diversity.

“That population of O. nivara has never been found again,” reported Dr Gurdev Khush, former IRRI principal plant breeder and 1996 World Food Prize laureate. “If these seeds had not been conserved in IRRI’s genebank, the trait of strong resistance to grassy stunt might have been lost forever”.

Scientists have identified 20 wild rice species, each of which might contain hundreds of different genetic lines. “There’s a lot of genetic variability in wild species, often far more than in cultivated rice,” said Dr David Mackill, head of IRRI’s Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Biochemistry Division. “Wide crossing is a way to cast our net more broadly and get some of these diverse genes into the rice genome.”

Other benefits of crossing wild and cultivated rice include greater possibilities for creating weed-resistant rice that actually suppresses weed growth (though the exact mechanics of this suppression are not completely known). Scientists are also currently focusing on breeding for tolerance to stresses such as drought and saline or acid soils. “Drought is a major non-biological stress in rainfed rice,” explained Dr Mackill. “If you could calculate the damage in

terms of yield loss, it would probably be at the top of the list. We are trying to breed rice that is adapted to using less water, eliminating the customary soil flooding. We call it aerobic rice.”

If wide-crossed rice varieties help farmers produce more grain using fewer resources—particularly water, pesticides and herbicides—farm communities will prosper, poor rice consumers will have more cash for other necessities, and pressure to plough under the last remaining areas of relatively undisturbed nature will decrease.

“I come from a rural farming family and I know how essential it is to improve crop plants,” said Dr Brar. “More broadly, if you want to help society—to contribute to humanity by improving access to better-quality food—then I think this is a good approach.”

By Adam Barclay, IRRI

This story was adapted from an article published in Rice Today magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 2004)

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Linking farmers and genebanks in Mali How wild rice species help their cultivated cousins

Dr Brar examines an example of the wild species Oryza rufipogon, which donated tolerance to acid sulfate soils to IRRI's popular, high-yielding variety IR64, as IRRI researcher Joie Ramos and Kofi Bimpong, a Master’s scholar from Ghana, look on.

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For more about IRRI, visit www.irri.org

On Rusinga Island in Kenya, farmers grow a variety of sorghum known as “Gopari.” Though it possesses highly desirable traits that provide a measure of security against the erratic weather patterns of the region, because of a distinct cultural tradition, only a few households grow Gopari. This tradition, which gave rise to the name of the variety, is threatening sorghum diversity on the island.

Rusinga Island is the second largest island in Lake Victoria. Farmers on the island struggle with irregular and unreliable rainfall, which has frequently caused crop failures, endangering the food and income security of the island. To minimize risks, farmers depend on a number of drought-resistant crops, including sorghum.

Local farmers have cultivated sorghum for decades. Its grains are usually made into a thick

flour paste known as “kuon” in the local Luo language. Sorghum is also used for beer, porridge, thatching, and medicine. At least eight varieties of sorghum grow on the island; this includes local varieties as well as improved strains.

One of these varieties is Gopari. It is an improved variety that was introduced into the community in the early 1980s. Gopari produces high yields, is easy to thresh, and, most importantly, it matures early. Farmers in Suba District on the shore of Lake Victoria especially favour Gopari for easily restoring the food supply after a period of drought. These desirable qualities led to the belief that Gopari would be widely cultivated by many households on Rusinga Island.

In fact, Gopari is only grown by a few households on the island. The reluctance to grow the variety

can be traced to a Luo cultural practice known as Ngweloruok, which occurs at the end of each cropping season. The ritual requires the head of a homestead to spend a night with his wife; the following day, he tastes the crop from his portion of land. Only after this ritual tasting can other members of the family, living on the same homestead and cultivating the same piece of land, be allowed to consume the crops of the current season. Thus, younger farmers must wait until their head of household performs Ngweloruok to harvest their own crops.

The high yields and early maturity of Gopari made it appealing to young farmers looking to expand their incomes. When the variety was introduced into the community, the young farmers tended to adopt it more readily than the older farmers who were happy with their familiar varieties and more concerned with

feeding their families than with quick monetary gain.

Gopari’s early maturity meant that it would be ready for harvesting before the sorghum varieties grown by most homestead heads. But because of Ngweloruok, it was not possible for the Gopari farmers to harvest the crop before the homestead head had harvested his own. If they complained, the younger farmers would be told by their elders to go make their own homesteads if they wanted to harvest Gopari before the other crops were mature. This is how Gopari acquired its name: it literally means “go make your own homestead”.

But Rusinga Island is not large enough for a sizeable number of young farmers to start their own homesteads. Thus, the Gopari variety and the genetic diversity that

it contains are put at risk by the cultural tradition of Ngweloruok. It is possible that the continued practice of this tradition will cause farmers to select against all early maturing crop varieties. It may thus be critical to the long-term survival of such varieties that they be conserved in genebanks.

This story arose from work supported by a UNEP-GEF grant concerned with identifying the traditional practices that support the conservation of landraces in arid and semi-arid ecosystems in Africa. The aim of the project is to determine how national agricultural policies can better support traditional farming systems.

By Evans Mutegi, National Genebank of Kenya

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Can cultural practices endanger crop diversity?

Rusinga is the second largest island in Lake Victoria.

Cutural traditions on Rusinga Island are threatening sorghum diversity there.

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One of the most famous sea ventures of the 18th century sought not silver and gold but a cheap source of food for plantation slaves in the Caribbean. The HMS Bounty, renowned for its infamous mutiny, had a simple goal when it set sail in 1787: to collect breadfruit. This mission, along with a second expedition four years later, represents the first known effort to collect and conserve the crop. More than two hundred years later, breadfruit’s natural habitat is under attack from natural and human forces, and the work of the world’s largest breadfruit collection is more important than ever.

Breadfruit is one of the most versatile tropical fruits. Originating in the Pacific, the crop is now grown throughout the Caribbean, due at least in part to the efforts of the infamous Captain William Bligh. The entire breadfruit tree—fruit, leaves, and trunk—can be used, making breadfruit an important component of local agro-economic and dietary systems in the tropics.

Breadfruit is usually green or yellow, with white or pale yellow flesh inside. It can be eaten as a fruit when mature or as a vegetable when immature. Breadfruit can be baked, boiled, steamed, or mashed and is an important source of carbohydrates. It can be fried into chips, used as an ingredient in pies and cakes, and even processed into baby food. When roasted, the fruit is said to have the taste and texture of fresh bread, ergo its name.

The wood of the breadfruit tree is used to construct houses and canoes, as well as to make glue, medicine, and even fabric. Breadfruit flowers can be burned to repel mosquitoes, while the leaves make excellent food platters. Reaching heights of 15-20 meters, breadfruit trees provide shade and shelter for other crops and animals.

By the mid-1700s, the merits of breadfruit had become well known, thanks to early tropical explorations. King George III of England ordered an expedition to travel to the South Pacific and collect breadfruit. The fruit was to be brought to the West Indies to feed the slaves on Caribbean plantations. On December 23, 1787, the HMS Bounty, captained by veteran seaman William Bligh, set

sail from Spithead, England and began its journey to Tahiti. After arriving in Tahiti ten months later, collecting parties under the command of first mate Fletcher Christian began their search for breadfruit.

The crew of the Bounty stayed in Tahiti for six months, creating strong ties with the native people: stories of the relationships between crewmen and Tahitian women abound in surviving journals of the mission. When the Bounty finally left Tahiti six months later, on April 6 1789, the crew had collected over 1000 breadfruit plants. But the crew did not want to leave their tropical paradise. Placing their desire to remain in Tahiti above their role as plant collectors, and angered by their harsh treatment by Bligh, the crew mutinied after only three weeks at sea. Bligh and eighteen fellow crew members were cast adrift, and the ship returned to Tahiti. The breadfruit plants, were thrown overboard as a final blow to Bligh.

Fortunately for breadfruit, Bligh survived and made it back to England. In fact, he captained a second breadfruit collecting mission on the ship HMS Providence, which departed England for Tahiti on July 6, 1791. This second mission was a success: Bligh collected over 2100 breadfruit plants and successfully transported

them to the West Indies in 1793. Ironically, after two collecting missions spanning six years, many of the slaves refused to eat breadfruit, not liking its taste. Future generations of West Indians eventually realized breadfruit’s versatility and nutritional value and adopted it as part of their local agricultural systems.

Modern breadfruit conservation dates back to the missions of Captain Bligh. Some of the samples collected by the HMS Providence were incorporated into the collections at the St. Vincent Botanical Garden in the Caribbean; offspring of one of the trees brought by Captain Bligh grow there to this day. The world’s largest collection of breadfruit is maintained at The Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii. Founded in 2002, The Breadfruit Institute holds some 195 accessions representing more than 120 varieties of breadfruit from throughout the tropical world. Research there has included projects to study the nutritional qualities of different breadfruit varieties and the development of in vitro propagation techniques that allow quicker production of breadfruit for distribution.

In recent years, drought, storm damage, and global warming have put many breadfruit varieties at risk. Human destruction of forests has caused the disappearance of wild populations of breadfruit. Because breadfruit is so vital to tropical communities, The Breadfruit Institute is committed to conserving and sharing knowledge on the cultivation and culture of the crop through in situ and ex situ research and development projects.

With its adventurous past and versatile present, breadfruit is an important species whose conservation and use can help ensure the food security of tropical communities. Breadfruit is on Annex 1 of the International Treaty and thus collections of breadfruit diversity are eligible for funding by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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The breadfruit mutiny

For more information, visit The Breadfruit Institute’s Web site athttp://www.breadfruit.org

Breadfruit is one of the most versatile of the fruits grown in the tropics.

Breadfruit has significant economic value in the Pacific. Breadfruit merchant, Savaii, Samoa.

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Since most bananas do not produce seed, the conservation of this very important crop has always been a challenge. These days, the technology of cryopreservation is being used to meet that challenge. Cryopreservation uses liquid nitrogen to freeze crop samples at temperatures as low as –80˚C. The International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP) is making use of the technique for long-term conservation at its International Musa Germplasm Collection in Leuven, Belgium. Musa

is the scientific name for banana and its close relative the plantain.

The INIBAP genebank has an in vitro collection of banana plantlets growing in test tubes. It is this collection that is tapped to produce the samples of planting material that are sent out around the world at the request of researchers, growers and breeders. However, these test-tube plants will not cater to the long-term aim of ensuring that banana diversity is available for future generations of banana growers. Plant tissue conserved in vitro is open to infection, decay and mutation. And the material must be taken out at least

every ten years and allowed to develop into full-grown plants in order to check the health and status of the specimen.

Cryopreservation is the most effective means available to secure the integrity of the collection over the long term. A specimen that is frozen today might be removed from the tank and regenerated into a healthy plant with a 95% success rate in, for example, 20 years time. The entire process, from extracting the tissue to freeze-drying and storage, takes little more than 48 hours. Currently, the INIBAP collection contains 220 cryopreserved accessions. The entire collection will hopefully be cryopreserved

by 2006. This would make it the first germplasm collection to be completely stored in liquid nitrogen.

A significant part of the collection in Leuven is infected with a virus that is impossible to eradicate—the Banana Streak Virus, which embeds itself in a plant’s DNA. The virus-infected specimens cannot be distributed outside of the genebank for fear of transmitting the disease caused by the virus to new locations. The fact that a number of the specimens in the collection are not available for outside use has always been a source of frustration to many scientists who would like to research the disease or the banana.

In the last two years a solution has come to light: a collection of freeze-dried banana leaves created by INIBAP. The leaves are obviously not useful for planting and therefore cannot act as a vector for the disease. However DNA can be extracted from the leaf material and used in molecular-level research. DNA analysis of infected plants might allow a better understanding of how the virus works and assist in producing safeguards against it.

The use of cryopreservation represents a sizeable step forward in the application of new technology to the field of crop diversity

conservation. In fact, the technique is the basis for a recently-initiated project to upgrade the part of the collection that is most relevant to farmers in Africa. This plan, developed within the framework of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, seeks to cryopreserve the 600 specimens of banana varieties that originated in Africa or are of special interest to African growers, and to transmit cryopreservation technologies directly to African scientists so that they can be used in the region. Collecting expeditions are also planned for the Congo basin. These missions will search the region for banana varieties with the aim of collecting and documenting the plants as they are encountered.

Cryopreservation is not limited to banana conservation. The method used by INIBAP was successfully developed for potato shoot-tips at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru, and for cocoyams at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Fiji. Cryopreservation is a sure way of securing the future of our food crops while the world around us changes.

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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Cryopreservation creates new hope for banana conservation

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For more information on INIBAP, visit the Web site at www.inibap.org

A man shows off his small urban banana plantation. Kingston, Jamaica.

Behind every alcoholic drink there is a virtuous plant. It sometimes comes as a surprise to find out that gin comes from juniper berries and vodka from potatoes. But in the rural areas of developing countries, farming communities know well where their local tipple comes from because they brewed it themselves. In Uganda, the presence and importance of bananas make them a major source of local wine and beer.

Bananas are among Uganda’s most important crops. According to an FAO report, Uganda produced in excess of 10 million tons of bananas in 2001; this was

more than 38% of Africa’s total banana production and second only to India. Bananas are so important in Uganda, and throughout East Africa, that the word matooke means both “banana” and “food”.

Specific varieties of the East African Highland banana are used in the production of beer in Uganda. In Mbirizi, a community in Masaka District, their use in brewing beer has been one of the main factors ensuring the conservation of nine banana landraces. Banana brew is in high demand for social functions, boosting the incomes of both the farmers who grow the bananas and

the brewers who brew the beer. The local beer is called omwenge, which can be further distilled to produce a commercial spirit called waragi.

In these rural communities, beer is important for other socio-economic reasons. Currency is often limited, so locally-brewed beer is used as a liquid currency. It is often used as payment for community-based labour, such as the construction of feeder roads to connect fields and farms with markets and villages. Local beer also plays a major role in gatherings such as funerals and festivals. On these occasions, people contribute either banana beer or bunches of bananas to be prepared and eaten during the event. In many parts of Uganda, a man must present banana beer to his future in-laws before a dowry is accepted.

The brewing process begins by harvesting banana bunches before they are ripe. The bananas are then

often piled in underground pits and covered to bring about ripening. Once ready, the fruits are removed, peeled and placed in wooden brewing vessels or on banana sheaths in trough shaped pits. They are then pressed, usually with some nimble footwork, and specific grasses are added to retain the residue. The juice is diluted and sorghum or other cereals are added to improve the taste and texture. The mixture is allowed to ferment and then the extract is poured through filtering funnels made from banana leaves. An example of a classic banana beer-brewing vessel, which looks somewhat like a canoe, is now on display at the Eden Project in the UK.

Banana and its close relative the plantain are not only important for the brewing of alcoholic beverages of course. They are an

essential part of the daily diet of people in over 100 tropical countries. Banana and plantain have been identified in the International Treaty as being among the world’s most important crops for food security. Important collections of banana are held around the world—collections that are at risk due to lack of funding. The Global Crop Diversity Trust is placing a priority on getting badly needed funds to collections of the crops, including banana, that are needed to feed the world.

This story arose from work supported by a UNEP-GEF grant concerned with identifying the traditional practices that support the conservation of landraces in arid and semi-arid ecosystems in Africa. The aim of the project is to determine how national agricultural policies can better support traditional farming systems.

By Beatrice-Male Kayiwa and John Mulumba

Wassw, Uganda National Agricultural Research

Organization, and Deborah Karamura, INIBAP

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Brewing bananas assists conservation

Boys peeling ripened bananas into a beer-brewing ‘canoe’ before mashing and fermenting them.

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A banana plantation in Bushenyi District.

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A family processing banana brew at their farm, Bushenyi District. Note the pit for ripening the bananas on the left far end and the wooden ‘canoe’ in which the bananas are mashed and fermented.©

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The exchange of plant genetic resources between crop diversity collections across national borders has long been seen as vital to the creation of better food crops and the fight against rural poverty around the world. A recent study of the origins and benefits of improved bean varieties that were derived in whole or in part from material conserved in genebanks lends credence to that conventional wisdom.

Published in 2002 by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (known as CIAT from the Spanish version of its name) in Cali, Colombia, the study lays out the patterns and economic impact of Latin America’s

longstanding international exchanges of bean genes. Its authors conclude that nearly three-quarters of the more than US$1 billion in regional benefits gained from planting CIAT-related varieties of common bean between 1970 and 1998 can be attributed to foreign genetic material.

CIAT agronomist Oswaldo Voysest analyzed the pedigrees of hundreds of commercial varieties released in Latin America over the past few decades. This allowed him to weight various countries’ genetic contributions to the new varieties. CIAT economists and co-researchers Nancy Johnson and Douglas Pachico then used price

and production figures to estimate and analyze the economic benefits of these germplasm flows, country by country.

For 11 of the 18 countries in the study, more than 70 percent of the genes present in released bean varieties originated in other countries. Colombia was the biggest contributor to the international flow, followed by Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. Not surprisingly, the greatest beneficiaries were Brazil and Argentina. These large countries have long been major bean producers and their breeders rely heavily on foreign bean diversity. Colombia and the Dominican Republic were the only countries where local sources accounted for more than half the genes making up released varieties.

“Clearly, everyone is both borrowing and lending crop material for mutual benefit,” said Johnson who led the study. “Patterns of country interdependence in sharing bean genes are similar to those for maize, rice, and wheat.”

The recognition of the interdependence of countries with regard to crop diversity was a major incentive behind the creation of a multilateral system for access and benefit sharing under the International

Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (see related story, p.20). Beans, a crop of great dietary importance for millions of poor people in Latin America and Africa, are among the crops included in the Treaty’s multilateral system. As such, collections of bean diversity are eligible to receive funds from the Global Crop Diversity Trust: financial support that should help ensure that the world’s vast diversity of beans continues to be available to underpin nutritional security and contribute to improving incomes long into the future.

By Gerald Toomey for CIAT

This story is based on an article that was originally published in “CIAT in Perspective 2001-2002: From Risk to Resilience”, published by CIAT in Cali, Colombia, September 2002.

Gerald Toomey is a science writer with Green Ink Publishing Services (www.greenink.co.uk)

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Sharing bean genes in Latin America

Farmers' varieties of common bean, collected at Risalda in Colombia.

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A particular type of cowpea landrace, Vigna unguiculata, is so central to the livelihoods of rural communities in the Chikwawa district of Malawi that its continued cultivation is almost guaranteed, at least for the foreseeable future. Known as Khobwe, this variety is versatile as both crop and food.

Cowpea is a grain legume grown throughout the tropics and subtropics. It is a versatile plant because it can grow in poor soil conditions due to its ability to use nitrogen in the soil atmosphere. Cowpea grain, which can also be eaten, contains 25% protein and is a good substitute for meat and fish.

The weather patterns in the Chikwawa district have forced residents to adapt their farming practices accordingly. Consistently high temperatures and fluctuating rainfall patterns produce an annual rainfall as low as 400 mm. Farmers mainly grow either drought-tolerant crop varieties or

those that can mature quickly enough to escape the effects of a drought.

Local farmers partially attribute Khobwe’s importance to its adaptability to these conditions. Seeds for planting are also in good supply: farmers select them from the current crop. Farmers who do not have enough seed can easily get it from relative, neighbours, or local markets. The cowpea crop is planted in the same fields as sorghum, pearl millet, maize and even cotton. Its compatibility in this multi-crop farming system allows farmers to save land, labour, and time because activities such as land preparation, planting, and weeding are done once for all of the crops.

People eat Khobwe in a variety of ways. Fresh leaves are eaten as a side dish or relish. Leaves can also be boiled, dried, and stored for later use in a dish known as mfutso. Zitheba is a salad or side dish prepared with fresh cowpea pods. Grains from the plant can be boiled,

cooked with sweet potato or with maize grains to form a mixture called mphunje. During times when cereals are scarce due to drought or other reasons, dry cowpea grains are boiled and then stirred to form a thick paste that can be eaten as a meal on its own.

The farmers of Chikwawa have declared this cowpea landrace to be a priority for their food security. Khobwe is too important to lose, and farmers will protect the crop by continuing to grow and consume it. As an extra safety measure, the Genebank of Malawi holds 152 accessions of cowpea—including Khobwe—in long-term conservation. A duplicate of the collection has been placed in the Southern Africa Development Community’s Regional Genebank in Zambia.

Cowpea is recognized to be vital for food security by the International Treaty on Plant

Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and and thus collections of cowpea diversity are eligible for funding by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

This story arose from work supported by a UNEP-GEF grant concerned with identifying the traditional practices that support the conservation of landraces in arid and semi-arid ecosystems in Africa. The aim of the project is to determine how national agricultural policies can better support traditional farming systems.

By Kingslay Kapila, Genebank of Malawi

Cowpea’s importance keeps it safe in Malawi

The fresh leaves of cowpeas are used to prepare a delicious

side-dish.

Farmers select cowpea landraces using criteria such as taste, habit, productivity, time taken to mature etc.

For more information contact Kingslay F. Kapila, Senior Assistant Collector and In Situ Officer at genebank@malawi.net

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Most farmers in the developing world are far less well equipped to cope with the multiple challenges they face than their counterparts in industrialized countries. Drought, pest and disease infestations and low soil fertility are daily realities for poor farmers, yet they lack the resources to purchase irrigation systems, pesticides, and fertilizer to overcome them. A new programme linking genetic resource institutions from around the world focuses on using molecular biology and genetic diversity to improve the staple foods of resource-poor people. These include crops such as cassava, millet, and cowpea, which are important in the developing world yet receive little research attention.

The Generation Challenge Programme is a 15-member consortium of advanced research institutes, national research programmes in developing countries, and the Future Harvest Centres. Deriving its name from the Latin root “genero”, which means “to produce or create”, the Generation Challenge Programme creates new tools and technologies and, through capacity-building and product delivery, generates new opportunities for developing country scientists and farmers.

Five subprogrammes comprise the core of the Generation Challenge Programme’s work: Genetic Diversity of Global Genetic Resources, The Comparative Genomics for Gene

Discovery, Trait Capture for Crop Improvement, Bioinformatics, and Genomics Capacity building.

The five subprogrammes are closely linked. In the first, plant biologists are examining the genetic diversity of collections maintained in the Future Harvest genebanks and by selected national programmes. Thousands of crop samples will be screened for the presence of traits of interest using molecular markers and field evaluation. The Comparative Genomics subprogramme examines various genomic maps to find genes that can be used to breed crops with desirable traits. The results of both of these subprogrammes feed into the Trait Capture for Crop Improvement

subprogramme as scientists begin the process of breeding improved crop varieties containing targeted genes. Bioinformatics (the application of computer techniques to the analysis of biological information) seeks to create an integrated genetic resources information network, while Capacity building is integrated throughout the structure of the Challenge Programme.

The Generation Challenge Programme has a particular focus on improving the drought tolerance of staple crops. Drought is a growing problem and poses an immense threat to food security around the world. Because the response of plants to drought is complex and involves interactions between many different molecular, biochemical, and physiological processes, understanding drought tolerance requires a multidisciplinary research strategy.

The strategy of the Programme is to identify genes, develop ways for detecting them in plant breeding programmes, and make initial gene transfers. Thus, the Programme does not seek to produce finished varieties of crops; that task will be left to the national programmes, the Future Harvest Centres and private institutions.

An important dividend of the Generation Challenge Programme will be a platform of tools and technologies to ensure that the discoveries of the programme make it from the lab to farmers’ fields. These tools and technologies will be comprehensive and free to the public.

By Jenny Nelson, Generation Challenge

Programme

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About Challenge ProgrammesInitiated by the Consultative G ro u p o n I n t e r n a t i o n a l Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a Chal lenge Programme i s a n i n d e p e n d e n t l y -governed project of concentrated research on areas supportive of the CGIAR’s work: ensuring successful forest management, supporting crop diversity, improving sustainable agriculture, etc. The projects focus on issues of global and regional significance, and therefore require the commitment of institutions from around the world. Challenge Programmes are time-bound.

A new initiative to unlock genetic diversity in crops for the resource-poor

For more information about the Generation Challenge Programme, visit the Web site at www.generationcp.org

When a child is born into the Dagomba society of northern Ghana, a meal of yam and other ingredients is prepared for relatives and the midwife who delivers the baby. The meal includes four yam tubers for a girl, three for a boy because a tradition of the Dagomba has it that girl babies have four joints in the neck while boy babies have only three. For the Dagomba, the yam has transcended agriculture to become part of the society’s culture.

Ghana is part of the so-called African “yam zone,” the area stretching from Cameroon to Cote D’Ivoire that produces 90%—amounting to 3.9 million metric tonnes—of the world’s yams each year. A staple crop of many African communities, yams are also economic and cultural

pillars for villages throughout the continent. About 75% of farmers in the northern region of Ghana cultivate yam.

In Northern Ghana, every farmer’s yam field contains an average of five varieties. As well as the varieties cultivated in the fields, farming households also grow an additional four to five types in their home gardens. Yams are usually the first crop cultivated after the land has been cleared. In traditional farming systems, farmers rotate planting schedules to ensure proper soil care and nutrient regeneration. Centuries of constant interaction with the environment and the development of cultural traditions have given yams an important place in the societies of northern Ghana, including the Dagomba.

The yearly yam harvest begins with a celebration called the yam festival. A yam type called Laabako is used in the first meal of the festival. Laabako is known for its early maturity, tasty tubers, and marketability. Before the yam festival, there is a ban on the consumption of newly harvested tubers; the Dagomba believe that any person who attempts to eat tubers before the festival rites are performed will die.

Yams also play an important role in the Dagomba religion. The Dagomba believe that gods inhabit stones and trees. Yams boiled with a certain herb are smeared on the surface of stones to secure the goodwill and patronage of the deities. The Dagomba also invoke their gods during the communal labour through which they obtain their seed yam. Each farmer is given a certain amount of work that he or she must perform on a neighbour’s plot of land to collect the necessary number of seed yams. Seed yams obtained through communal labor enjoy the blessing of the gods and produce high yields.

The diversity of yam is important to the Dagomba because they use different varieties for different cultural purposes. Baayeri

is believed to be the leader of all yam types. Farmers always have a few Baayeri yam growing in their fields. If there are no Baayeri yams, the other yam types will leave the farm and go elsewhere. On the other hand, too many Baayeri yams will lead other varieties astray. Chenchito is a type eaten at funerals and festivals, while the small tubers of Kpuringa yams are mostly eaten by children.

The Dagomba have developed local practices for improving crop yields and quality. These include early ‘pricking’ (cutting out the bulk of the tuber while leaving the top and vine still in the ground to produce further tubers), using leaf color to determine proper harvest times, and soaking the seed yam in a solution from the bark of certain trees before planting to improve sprouting. The ability to carry out these practices determines the status of farmers in the community, giving the yam an important role in the social structure of the community.

Recognizing its importance for food security, yam is included on Annex I of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and thus collections of yam diversity are eligible for funding by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. For the Dagomba, however, yams will never be simply food: the yam festival, and

the new harvesting season,

draw closer every day.

This story arose from work supported by a UNEP-GEF grant concerned with identifying the traditional practices that support the conservation of landraces in arid and semi-arid ecosystems in Africa. The aim of the project is to determine how national agricultural policies can better support traditional farming systems.

By G. Kranjac-Berisavljevic and B.Z. Gandaa,

University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana

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The cultural roles of yams

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The Dagomba believe Baayeri to be the leader of all yam types

Dagomba farmers proudly display their yams.

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Scientists have been combing the remote corners of Central Asia and the Caucasus in search of plants that can help to ensure the future of agriculture in the region and around the world. The team of plant collectors recently returned from a three-week germplasm collecting mission to Turkmenistan.

The team, which included three Australians, two Russians, an American, a Canadian, and three local counterparts, rumbled through the remote Turkmenistan countryside in hulking Soviet-era four-

wheel drive vehicles. They traveled east to within a kilometre of the Afghanistan border and west to the Caspian Sea. Each day’s journey was punctuated by as many as eight stops at promising sites, where team members would fan out on foot in search of a variety of plants. The team collected a total of 413 samples, featuring 106 species from 48 sites. The accessions included landraces of barley, wheat, and forage and range species. The collected material will be cleaned and dried and deposited in crop diversity collections at the International Center

for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Syria, the US Department of Agriculture, the Western Australian Agricultural Department, and the Garrygalla Experimental Station for Plant Genetic Resources in Turkmenistan.

The collections are a ready source of plant diversity from which plant breeders and farmers can select traits to counter constraints to food production. “The beneficial traits derived from genebanks and used by plant breeders account for millions of tons of increased agricultural production,” said collecting mission leader Dr Kenneth Street, an agricultural ecologist with ICARDA. “The material we collected in Turkmenistan could spell the difference between a productive, healthy agricultural sector in countries that are expected to become hotter and drier due to climate change. That might sound dramatic, but the traits for drought and heat tolerance have to come from somewhere. It means going back to the places where many important crop and forage plants originated, places like Turkmenistan.”

Principal funding for the collecting mission was provided by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

and Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) as part of a larger programme of support for crop diversity efforts in Central Asia and the Caucasus. ICARDA is training researchers throughout Central Asia and the Caucasus and helping national institutions to build their capacity to collaborate with scientists outside of the region. “We’re developing close productive relationships based on a common belief that crop diversity is a priceless resource that should be conserved, shared, and used to feed people,” Street said.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is coordinating an effort, with support from GRDC, to develop a regional conservation strategy for Central Asia and the Caucasus in consultation with regional collection holders and crop experts. Dr Street will help to facilitate the process to develop the strategy, due to be completed next year.

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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Combing Turkmenistan for plant resources

Collecting forage and rangeland species in Turkmenistan.

For more about ICARDA, visit the Web site at www.icarda.org

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Many people who depend on the coconut call it the tree of life because it supplies them with more than 100 different products including food and drink, fodder for livestock, fibre and building materials.

Coconut is believed to have first grown in the Western Pacific. Today, it grows on about 12 million hectares in 90 countries worldwide and about 10 million families rely on coconuts as their main source of food and income. “If all the people who depend on coconut around the world took full advantage of all of its uses,” explained Pons Batugal, Coordinator of COGENT–-the international coconut network—“it would increase food production, improve nutrition, generate income, create employment, and help protect the environment.”

But the coconut faces several problems that prevent it from being fully exploited. These include low yield, unstable markets, pests and diseases, natural calamities and genetic erosion.

COGENT is attempting to tackle all of these problems. IPGRI established COGENT in 1992 to improve the sustainable production of coconut, increase

incomes derived from the crop and to promote a worldwide programme for the conservation and use of coconut diversity. The benefits of creating the network were clear. Networks allow member countries to share best practices more efficiently and to find solutions to common problems more effectively. At present, COGENT has 38 member countries, all of which have made a commitment to collaborate on coconut research and to share information and coconut samples.

COGENT has worked to perfect different methods of conserving

coconuts, such as in vitro conservation and storage at very low temperatures in liquid nitrogen, known as cryopreservation. COGENT has also established a multi-site International Coconut Genebank. Plantlets and trees are maintained in field genebanks situated in each of five regions: Southeast and East Asia, South Asia, the South Pacific, Africa and the Indian Ocean, and Latin America and the Caribbean. A rational and efficient approach to conservation such as this, which includes sharing resources and responsibilities, is very much in line with the approach being promoted by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The International Coconut

Genebank could in fact serve as a model for some of the crop conservation strategies currently under development for funding by the Trust (see related story, p.23). Coconut is included in the multilateral system of access and benefit sharing under the International Treaty.

Over the next ten years, COGENT’s work will include the establishment of an inventory and database of local coconut varieties, using the farmers’ own methods of identification and measurement. Work will also be directed to extending the coverage of the International Coconut Genebank and a globally coordinated

breeding programme will be established to support the coconut breeding work of national agricultural research programmes. Farmers have extensive knowledge about the management of coconut diversity and their participation in this breeding work will be essential to ensuring that improved coconut varieties meet their needs.

By Cassandra Moore and Pons Batugal, IPGRI

Banking on the tree of life

The International Coconut Genebank for Africa and Indian Ocean, Côte d’Ivoire.

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The Global Crop Diversity Trustc/o FAOViale delle Terme di Caracalla00100 Rome, ItalyTel: 39 06 5705 3841Email: info@startwithaseed.org

c/o IPGRIVia dei Tre Denari 472/a 00057 Maccarese(Fiumicino)00057 Rome, ItalyTel: 39 06 6118 215

www.startwithaseed.org

It is not very often that the United Nations dedicates an entire calendar year to the celebration of a single crop. In fact, it has never happened. That is, until 2004 was declared the International Year of Rice by the United Nations General Assembly.

The impetus for the International Year of Rice came from a 1999 resolution sponsored by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). The resolution called on the United Nations General Assembly to set aside an entire year during which the whole world could focus on the importance of rice. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was asked to facilitate the organization of events and activities to mark the International Year of Rice. The Philippines, which hosts IRRI’s headquarters, along with 43 other nations, sponsored a proposal that was adopted by the UN on December 16, 2002, and the International Year of Rice became a reality.

The motto of the International Year of Rice is “Rice is Life”, and its primary goal is to help the world realize just how true this is. Rice is cultivated in 113 countries and on all continents except Antarctica. It is the staple food in 33 countries. In Asia,

more than two billion people get most of their energy intake from rice, and it is the single most rapidly growing food source in Africa. Incidentally, nine of the top ten rice-producing countries are in Asia; can you guess the one that is not? (Answer below).

But the importance of rice is not limited to the realms of food and nutrition. Rice has extremely important economic value as well, particularly in the developing world. Rice-based production systems, and the associated post-harvest operations, employ almost one billion people around the world. In Asia alone, rice-based labour is the principal source of income for over 100 million households. Fully 80% of the world’s rice is grown in low-income countries by small-scale farmers.

It is clearly hard to overestimate the importance of rice as a foundation for global food and economic security. So why the need for a year of concentrated exposure? Threats to the crop are extensive: improper farming and watering techniques, the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, limitations on farmers’ access to land, and the lack of a working information network to share the latest news and technologies. “The need for a sustainable

increase in rice production affects everyone,” said Dr Jacques Diouf, Director-General of FAO, in his message officially launching the International Year of Rice. “The International Year of Rice presents a unique opportunity for farmers, consumers, environmentalists, government ministries, international agencies and stakeholders from civil society to work together for a shared goal.”

The organizers of the International Year of Rice are developing a public awareness network to provide farmers and producers with current rice strategies and brokering new or stronger alliances between agricultural institutions

and governments. They are assisting in the implementation of more successful farming techniques, and promoting healthier environmental conservation protocols as a basis for healthier rice production. A series of conferences and events will highlight the importance of rice throughout the year. Finally, there are contests for scientific papers and photography for which the themes include rice crop improvement and rice crop management. “This is an action campaign—a chance for us to make good on our promise to the billions of people for whom rice is life," said Dr Louise Fresco, Assistant Director General to the FAO Agriculture Department, at the FAO Rice

Conference in February.

The ultimate goal of the International Year of Rice is to extend these global awareness projects into 2005 and beyond.

By the way, the answer to the question posed above is Brazil, which produced 10 219 300 metric tonnes in 2003. And there’s more than a grain of truth to that!

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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2004 is the International Year of Rice

Women planting rice in a paddy field. Orissa, India.

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Visit the Web site of the International Year of Rice: http://www.fao.org/rice2004/index_en.htm

The Masai Mara region in Kenya is home to lions, cheetahs, warthogs, wildebeests, and baboons to name just a few of its wild animals. However, over the past twenty years, more than half of the big mammals of the region, including many rhinos, lions, and hippos, have disappeared; the African wild dog and the roan antelope have become extinct. In the same period, the pastoral populations of Maasai people, whose livelihoods depend on the domestic cattle, goats and sheep that they raise, have become increasingly impoverished.

Some years ago, a group including pastoral peoples, conservationists, private industry, land managers and researchers launched a joint venture to study how wildlife interacts with people and their livestock. The first Mara Count, conducted in 1999, showed that the region’s pastoral settlements affect wildlife patterns: some species prefer to graze areas around human settlements where the grass is short, while others avoid the settlements. In November 2002, a second Mara Count was carried out by 84 people in 25 teams, including 33 young men from the Masai Mara community. The

teams completed a count of people, wildlife, and domestic livestock across more than 2 200 km2 of the Mara pastoral-wildlife ecosystem in five days. The teams counted the number and size of human settlements and 38 wild and 5 domestic animal species, as well as animal carcasses, water sources, tsetse flies, burnt areas, and even vehicular traffic and rubbish. They also estimated the height, cover and greenness of grass, shrubs and trees. The teams used hand-held personal computers that combined global positioning satellite and geographic information systems

mapping, superimposing population densities on physical maps. This high-tech method provided the counting teams with real-time navigation, highly accurate mapping and instantaneous computerized data entry.

The final tally included 400 000 individual wildlife and domestic livestock and covered 373 settlements, 72 tourist lodges and camps, and 13 airstrips. Results were verified and mapped within five weeks. The Mara Count team distributed a final report in June 2003 to residents of the Mara ecosystem as well as to various NGOs and national agricultural research systems working on pastoral development and wildlife conservation. The data are available to the public at http://www.maasaimaracount.org

Interestingly, the Mara Count revealed that pastoral settlements can benefit local wildlife. “The Count showed that some species are attracted to pastoral settlements,” said Robin Reid, an ecologist from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI),

who helped lead the Count. “For example, livestock graze and trample the grass around settlements, helping maintain the short and actively growing state preferred by wildlife. There is an ideal moderate density of human settlements at which wildlife diversity is greatest.” The Count indicates that whereas many settlement densities are at this deal point, in other locations, especially along the edge of the Mara Reserve, human populations are much higher. “At high human population and settlement densities, people turn from pastoralism to cultivation,” explained Joseph Ogutu, ILRI ecologist and modeller. “Larger townships develop, land is overtaken for planting, and the livestock density increases, causing competition for water between wildlife and livestock.”

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Geneflow NewsMasai Mara Count paints detailed picture of region’s wildlife

The Masai Mara Count reveals rich detail about the regions human and animal inhabitants.

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The 2002 Mara Count also revealed the size (up to 23 km2) and locations of “multiple species associations”. These associations are between two or more wildlife species—most commonly a mixture of Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles, topi, impala and warthog, along with resting or grazing migratory zebra and wildebeest—in a group with individuals not more than 300 m from each other. “An effective conservation strategy for the Mara that is able to protect the classic savanna assemblage of many species living within sight of one another will depend on understanding the conditions that lead to the formation, expansion, contraction and collapse of multiple species associations,” said Mike Rainy, one of the scientists leading the Count.

The results of the Count are already leading to more enlightened and equitable management practices. The national and local governments are using the results to foster wildlife conservation policies that also support local people. The results have also sparked the development of a transboundary management and conservation plan for the Greater Serengeti-Mara

Ecosystem that spans Kenya and Tanzania. The Mara Count team is now the core of a project studying the relationship between livestock keeping, poverty alleviation and wildlife conservation in East Africa. Plans for the Mara Count 2005 are already underway.

The Maasai people are at a critical juncture. The pressure for these impoverished people to intensify crop farming on lands adjacent to the Mara Reserve is growing despite evidence that unsustainable crop cultivation is destroying the ecosystem. What would help the Maasai—as well as their ecosystem—would be policies that gave them incentives to continue practising wildlife-friendly animal husbandry practices. A greater share of the tourism revenue would be a good start.

By Susan MacMillan, ILRI

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Mohamed Latrache Ben Baali is a 63 year-old farmer from Berraiane (Ghardaia, Algeria). Twenty years ago, he established a 7-hectare farm and planted a variety of fruit trees, including fig, citrus and date palm. Today, Mohamed Latrache’s farm boasts 140 date palm trees, grown from 16 Algerian varieties. His experience and knowledge led to an invitation to serve on the local committee of a project to promote the conservation and use of date palm in the Maghreb region. The project is sponsored by GEF-UNDP and coordinated by IPGRI. Since joining the local committee, Mohamed Latrache has become a major defender of date palm diversity in the region.

To protect his farm from the winds, Mohamed Latrache planted seeds of date palm around its periphery. From the 100 seeds that sprouted, the farmer selected 16 new varieties. Seven of the new varieties have been chosen by the date palm project to be multiplied and distributed to other farmers in the region.

Mohamed Latrache has participated in a number of diversity fairs sponsored by the date palm project to proudly present some of his date varieties. Each of his new varieties is named for people he holds dear and for those who share his enthusiasm for date palm: Baba Ali (named after his father), Inghiben (to the memory of absentees), Yakoub (a martyr during the Algerian War). Following a visit by the author of this article, Mohamed Latrache named one of his varieties Nasr!

The farmer’s devotion to diversity is impressive but it is far from unique. It is shared by people all over the world who work tirelessly to ensure that crop diversity is cared for and available for use by all humanity.

By Noureddine Nasr, IPGRI

Date palm diversity—one farmer’s story

For more information on the Masai Mara Count, Visit the Web site at http://www.maasaimaracount. org and www.ilri.cgiar.org

For more information on the Maghreb Date Palm Project, contact Noureddine Nasr. n.nasr@cgiar.org or visit the Web site at www.maghrebdatepalm.org

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Mohamed Latrache Ben Baali proudly displays his date palm varieties.

It is a fairly well known fact that 50% of the world’s caloric intake comes from only three crops—rice, wheat, and maize. And only 150 crops are commercialized on a global scale. Ethnobotanic surveys indicate that at least 7000 plant species around the world may be cultivated or harvested from the wild for food. But thousands of these species—all of which have the potential to improve human nutrition, food security and livelihoods—are not receiving the attention they deserve.

In an effort to turn this around, IPGRI launched a global project to increase the development and use of neglected crops in 2001. Now in its third year,

the initiative has made significant progress.

Traditionally, agricultural research has paid little attention to species that may be extremely important for a community, country or region but are of little value internationally. As a result, our knowledge about crops that are a critical component of the diets of millions of the rural poor is very limited. Crops such as millets, bambara groundnut, grass pea, amaranth and quinoa and medicinal and aromatic plants such as cumin, coriander and caper are often extremely valuable to local agricultural and economic systems. Such crops often possess qualities that make them well suited for marginal habitats: qualities such as drought resistance, the ability to produce a consistent yield in a variety of climates, and resistance

to viruses or insects. But these crops lack profile and priority in the spheres of trade, development, and research.

The IPGRI project is funded largely by the International Fund for Agricultural Development. It supports work in three regions—Latin America, South Asia, and West Asia and North Africa—focusing on a set of priority crops for each. In Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, efforts concentrate on Andean grains such as quinoa and amaranth, while in India and Nepal, the emphasis is on nutritious millets. In Egypt and Yemen, the project focuses on medicinal and aromatic plants.

The project links with existing development projects to raise awareness of the value of the priority species. It is helping to

create region-wide information networks on these neglected crops and analyzing the potential for increasing their presence in local markets. Important partners include the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation in India, the Ministries

of Agriculture in Nepal, Ecuador, Egypt and Nepal, and NGOs such as PROINPA in Bolivia and CIRNMA in Peru.

The project’s progress report from the second year shows success stories in every region. In Latin America, more than 1 100 accessions of local grains have been regenerated and multiplied to increase their availability for use by farmers. In Egypt, 80 000 oregano and 60 000 mint seedlings have been distributed to local farmers—oregano and mint have great economic value in the region. Farmers in Nepal have planted 17 popular varieties of finger millet in demonstration plots to determine which varieties best suit their needs. There has also been a focus on long-term benefits: a greenhouse able to produce medicinal plants at the rate of 150 000 seedlings per year has been established in El Arish, Egypt through the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation.

“Our greatest success has been in unblocking institutional barriers by bringing different groups together—from farmers to genebanks to marketers,” according to Dr Stefano Padulosi, the project coordinator. Such is the case in Ecuador where certain varieties of lupin

were reintroduced to farmers from the country’s national genebank. And the links work both ways. Farmers recently visited the genebank to request material and assistance in establishing in situ conservation sites.

“The project is surpassing expectations in terms of getting people to work together on these important but overlooked species,” said Dr Padulosi. “This requires respecting and supporting the roles of all partners: letting genebanks conserve, allowing plant breeders to develop new and improved varieties, empowering farmers to make use of the varieties they prefer, and providing marketers with a wide range of products from which to choose.”

So what does the future hold for neglected species? “We hope that our experience can be shared and scaled up in other projects,” said Dr Padulosi. “It is not our intention to simply move from crop to crop, and country to country. Rather, it is imperative that the lessons we have learned in the past three years are put to good use in bringing the benefits of biodiversity to the people that need it the most.”

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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Neglected no more

Medicinal and aromatic plants such as oregano and mint have great value throughout West Asia and North Africa.

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In 2002, two villages in the Limpopo province of South Africa lost the leafy vegetable known as phara. A combination of natural and human factors caused phara to disappear from the area. Today, thanks to a partnership between farmers and researchers, phara has returned to the region along with a new understanding of the importance of plant conservation.

Phara is a wild relative of muskmelon, whose fruit varieties include cantaloupe and honeydew. Communities in northern South Africa use phara both as a leafy vegetable and for its fruit, which is locally known as wild cucumber. Many also eat phara as a relish with a stiff maize porridge called styfpap.

In 2002, researchers from ARC-Roodeplaat Vegetable and Ornamental Plant Institute were conducting studies on the conservation

and use of traditional leafy vegetables. Part of the research involved cataloguing the names, uses, and availability of the crops that were available in the two nearby villages of Mars and Glenroy. While discussing and prioritizing their crops, villagers focused on phara. An extension officer working with ARC-Roodeplaat realized that only one woman had a few phara seeds left and that the vegetable was in great danger of being lost forever. The villagers committed themselves to collecting phara seeds in the coming season.

When researchers returned to the villages one year later, they discovered that phara had been exterminated by drought, livestock that turned local gardens into snack bars, and limited local conservation efforts. The researchers initiated the recovery process through an information gathering and public awareness campaign. Together with the villagers, they developed strategies on how to conserve phara once the crop was re-established. For example, the traditional village role of seed keeper had vanished due to

Westernization: villagers bought seeds instead. Now, the villagers appointed two women in each community to save phara seeds; these women would then give seeds to community members who had lost the crop.

The team also enquired whether friends or family members in a nearby village had any phara left. They discovered that a relative living 65 kilometres away had some seeds. Ladies of the villages went on a collecting trip and provided seed to the National Plant Genetic Resources Centre Genebank, the ARC-Roodeplaat genebank, and the community. The national genebank houses long-term storage of phara seed, while the ARC-Roodeplaat genebank contains working collections used for research purposes. Seed multiplication was

conducted at ARC-Roodeplaat to supply the communities with more seed and to develop a sufficient amount of seed to be conserved in the genebank.

More than a year later, the renaissance of phara is progressing healthily in Mars and Glenroy, accompanied by a new awareness of the importance of native diversity.

By Ineke Vorster and Willem Jansen van Rensburg,

ARC-Roodeplaat

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The rediscovery of leafy vegetable boosts appreciation for diversity

Visit the Web site of ARC-Roodeplaat at http://www.arc.agric.za/institutes/roodeplaat/roodeplaatmain.htm

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A year after completely disappearing from villages in South Africa, phara is now flourishing there.

Farming communities in South Africa eat both the leaves and the fruit of the phara plant.

Many communities in northern Ghana are strongly patrilineal by tradition. Only men can own land or dictate farming practices for the family. But in certain areas of northern Ghana, it is women who are ensuring the survival of one of the most important crops grown in the country: rice. The women have continued to cultivate traditional varieties of African rice in the face of increased reliance on improved varieties by the men of their communities.

African rice has high gluten content, a nutty taste, and is so filling when cooked that it is often regarded as an important component of meals. Local varieties of African rice are also highly resistant to drought and crop diseases. But in many communities, the men often choose to “modernize” by planting improved strains of Asian rice that, while they might be higher yielding and produce greater economic returns, lack the cultural significance and possibly the nutritional content of

traditional varieties. The improved varieties are not parboiled before milling and many researchers believe that parboiled rice retains more protein, vitamins, and minerals and is more nutritious than raw milled rice.

The farmers of Gore, in the Bawku District of the Upper East Region of Ghana, are representative of the trend towards new varieties. In Gore, where land belongs to male farmers, only small plots are given to women; these tend to be water logged or infertile. Nevertheless, more women cultivate rice than men, and their fields tend to be better managed than those of the male farmers. According to surveys conducted by the University for Development Studies, Tamale in Ghana and the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute in 2001-2002, women could also describe the characteristics of many more rice varieties than their male counterparts.

Women farmers consider traditional rice varieties to be superior to modern varieties in several ways. Traditional

rice requires only a short cooking time, suitable for the preparation of dishes such as waakye (cooked rice and beans) and rice balls. Traditional varieties perform well without expensive inputs such as the fertilizers and pesticides applied to most of the types introduced in Ghana over the past 30 or more years. They can also be cultivated in the adverse conditions of drought or floods.

Traditional rice varieties are economically important, most noticeably for parboiling. Parboiled rice is cooked briefly in boiling water and then submerged in ice-cold water to stop the cooking. Parboiled rice from the region commands a high price on the market due to its cooking quality. Thousands of women in northern Ghana increase their income by participating in the parboiled rice industry.

The women farmers of Gore name each rice variety they cultivate. Some varieties are named for the farmers who first introduced them to the community: Mariama, Peter and Mr. Moore. Agona is a variety originating from the town with the same name in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Other varieties are named for the size and shape of their grain. For instance, Agongula means “short

grain of rice” in the local Kusal language, and Mui-sablic refers to the black colour of the husk. One variety’s name means “help me buy a dress” in the local language.

Each year, farmers plant their fields from seed reserved from the previous harvest. Some buy seed at the market or exchange with other villages from as far away as Burkina Faso and Togo. Others exchange seed locally with relatives, colleagues and friends. Women who mill small quantities of rice at the local mill often exchange seeds to try a new variety. Farmers also keep small quantities of seed in store after planting to avoid total loss of the material.

The women of Gore have made a conscious choice to maintain their traditional agricultural system. To us, their decision is a boon for biodiversity conservation; to them, it is just a logical continuation of a system that has worked for many years.

This story arose from work supported by a UNEP-GEF grant concerned with identifying the traditional practices that support the conservation of landraces in arid and semi-arid ecosystems in Africa. The

aim of the project is to determine how national agricultural policies can better support traditional farming systems.

By G. Kranjac-Berisavljevic, University for Development

Studies, Tamale, Ghana and P.B. Tanzubil, Savanna

Agricultural Research Institute, Bawku, Manga,

Ghana

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Women of Ghana challenge trend towards modern rice varieties

Equipment for parboiling oflocal rice in Northern Ghana.

Local varieties of rice grown mostly by women.

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Traditionally, learning has involved gathering students in one place for instruction. These days, information and communication technologies allow the creation of virtual classrooms comprising people physically located in many different places.

“E-learning” is a form of distance education that uses web browsers to access content from remote locations on the Internet. Besides allowing the use of virtual classrooms, it fosters interaction between students and educational content, between students and teachers, and amongst students, making the learning experience more pleasant and relevant

than the more passive approaches taken to distance learning in the past. E-learning is also cost efficient. Although requiring an initial investment in course development, study materials and making the delivery system operational, it has none of the costs associated with the traditional training course, such as transportation and lodging.

In 2003, IPGRI and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) joined forces to deliver Spanish-language training on ex situ conservation to genebank staff in Latin America and the Caribbean using e-learning techniques.

IPGRI and CIAT established an alliance with two key partners—REDCAPA and Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Palmira campus). REDCAPA is a network of organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean concerned with training in agricultural economics, policies and sustainable rural development. It has abundant experience in distance education and a platform to deliver courses in a virtual environment. Universidad Nacional de Colombia is a highly reputed scientific and technological institution, which currently offers a M.Sc. programme in plant genetic resources. The outcome of the alliance is the first e-course on ex

situ conservation of crop diversity. The course is being offered from mid-August to mid-November 2004 at REDCAPA’s virtual campus (http://www.redcapa.org.br).

The training mainly targets professionals and technicians who work in genebanks, botanic gardens, arboreta or on crop diversity projects in the region. However, Spanish speaking students the world over are welcome to participate. Instructors from IPGRI, CIAT and Universidad Nacional facilitate the course.

The partners hope that the e-learning initiative will enhance the management capacity of staff in the 230 genebanks located in Latin America, which together maintain over 200 000 samples of native and introduced materials. A spin-off benefit of the initiative has been the creation of a community of practice among the partner institutions. The partners are sharing their knowledge and experience of crop diversity conservation, and working together to

develop a methodology for distance learning that can eventually be made available to students in many different languages.

By Margarita Baena, IPGRI

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From face-to-face to web-based conservation training

The team that developed the distance course on ex situ conservation represented a wide range of institutions and disciplines. ©

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For further information, contact Margarita Baena, Information and Training Specialist in the IPGRI Americas Group: m.baena@cgiar.org

Europe has exceptionally rich collections of crop diversity—almost two million accessions conserved ex situ. These collections are held by national genebanks and research institutions throughout the region. Until recently, detailed information about the collections could only be obtained by approaching the institutions or consulting their Web sites individually. Now, fulfilling a promise to make information on the collections publicly and widely available, European nations have joined together to create the European Internet Search Catalogue, or EURISCO, a continent-wide plant genetic resources search engine.

In signing the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, countries agreed

to provide access to their biological diversity and related information to the public. This commitment was reinforced by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which was approved by the European Community in March 2004.

Most European countries met the information sharing commitment by creating national accession-level inventories. At the same time, European crop databases were also being created by a variety of institutions, often within the framework of the European Cooperative Programme on Crop Genetic Resources Networks (ECP/GR). These crop-specific databases compiled accession-level information from different

institutions to meet the needs of breeders and crop experts. There are now over fifty crop databases.

In 2000, the European Commission funded a project to establish the European Plant Genetic Resources Infra-Structure, or EPGRIS, with the goal of designing a comprehensive catalogue of European holdings. Three years in development, EURISCO was launched in June 2003. IPGRI hosts and maintains EURISCO on behalf of ECP/GR.

EURISCO draws information on the crop diversity

collections of Europe together as never before. “The idea was to have a complete catalogue of all the crops from all the countries and also be able to optimize information flows between countries and the central database,”

said Lorenzo Maggioni, ECP/GR Coordinator at IPGRI. EURISCO provides a central searchable database of Europe’s crop diversity collections, spanning countries and crops. The CGIAR’s System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources (SINGER) provided the model for EURISCO and provided assistance in its development.

To produce EURISCO, the national inventories of each European country and the central crop databases were catalogued in a common format and entered into the central database by national focal points. Each accession is characterized by more than twenty searchable

passport descriptors, such as accession origin, location, crop, and type (seed, root, etc.).

EURISCO currently contains information on 900 000 accessions from 41 European countries.

But there is still much work to be done. “We are only halfway there,” said Maggioni. “Our goal is to eventually catalogue all two million accessions held in European genebanks.” EURISCO does not handle the dissemination of material from the genebanks but informs users where they are stored; users can then request the material directly from the source

In ancient Greek, the word eurisco means “I find.” Now, with EURISCO’s help, breeders and researchers around the world can quickly and easily find information on the material held in Europe’s rich crop diversity collections.

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European countries join forces to ease access to crop diversity information

For more information about EURISCO, visit the Web site at http://eurisco.ecpgr.org/index. php

EURISCO is catologuing European holdings of the region's most important crops.

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The island nations of Oceania are spread across 30 million km2 of the Pacific. The activities of generations of farmers living on the islands, coupled with their isolation, has allowed the development of tremendous diversity in the crops grown in the region, such as breadfruit, pandanus (a popular flavouring in tropical Asia), banana, kava (used to make a stimulating herbal drink), taro, sweet potato and yams. Today, the region’s crop diversity is severely threatened by climate change, the spread of modern lifestyles and urban migration, cash crops, and outbreaks of pest and diseases. A recent initiative to increase collaboration among plant genetic resources programmes in the Pacific nations is helping to counteract these threats.

Pacific nations are usually comprised of numerous islands with small populations and limited material resources. While the diversity within the region is collectively significant (although still limited compared to other regions), the diversity found on an individual island—or even in an individual country—is often limited. However, Pacific nations usually grow similar crops and have similar agricultural systems as well as the same agricultural problems. The Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), a technical assistance and research body established

in 1947 as the South Pacific Commission, is assisting these island nations to make the most effective and sustainable use of their biological resources, including the diversity of their crops and forests.

The Regional Germplasm Centre, or RGC, has been a key component of the SPC’s work in plant genetic resources since 1998 when it was established with support from Australia and the European Union. The aim of the RGC is to assist Pacific Island countries to conserve the region’s crop diversity and to facilitate access to that diversity by farmers, breeders and other users. The RGC, whose collection is housed in a tissue culture facility at Suva in Fiji, maintains regional collections of important root and tuber and other crops, as well as improved material of crops such as bananas. The RGC is developing a regional conservation strategy that will identify the region’s most important collections and prioritize them for funding by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (see related story, p.23).

Another initiative of the SPC is the Pacific Agricultural Plant Genetic Resources Network, or PAPGREN. Established in 2001 with funding from Australia and New Zealand, PAPGREN has the dual goals of strengthening national programmes and stimulating cooperation among them.

PAPGREN-facilitated projects include documenting existing crop collections in a regional inventory, developing a regional conservation strategy for breadfuit and taro—both are crops that will be supported by the Global Crop Diversity Trust—and the publication of a pamphlet explaining the choices that decision-makers and researchers have before them in the realm of plant genetic resources policy, in particular with regard to access and benefit sharing and intellectual property. PAPGREN has also assisted in the establishment of field genebanks in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and Vanuatu. In the FSM state of Pohnpei, farmers have donated yam varieties—disappearing from their fields because of disease—to the department of agriculture for conservation, both at the research station and in tissue culture at the RGC. PAPGREN is also supporting taro seed storage and sweet potato evaluation in Papua New Guinea. Other nations that have participated in network activities are the Cook Islands, Fiji, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Tonga. There are regular network meetings and training courses are common.

The PAPGREN project works in close collaboration with other SPC units and projects, including an European Union-funded project concerned with developing sustainable agriculture in the Pacific. This project is using participatory methods to identify constraints in agriculture at representative sites in all Pacific island countries. Interventions, including crop diversity conservation and use, are then designed in partnership with farmers to address these problems.

“98% of the Pacific region is made up of ocean,” said Dr Mary Taylor, Adviser to the RGC. “The Pacific

Community, with help from the RGC and PAPGREN, is helping to ensure that the crop diversity found in the other 2% is conserved as efficiently and effectively as possible.”

By Luigi Guarino, Secretariat of the Pacific

Community

Plant genetic resources networking in the Pacific

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PAPGREN is helping to connect small island nations like Fiji with

its neighbours in the Pacific.

Luigi Guarino is the Plant Genetic Resources Advisor to the Secretariat of the Pacific Community.For further information, contact Luigi Guarino (Luigig@spc.int). Visit the PAPGREN Web site at http://www.spc.int/pgr and the PAPGREN weblog at http://papgren.blogspot.com/

Taro farmer, Fiji.

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Pomegranate is a rich fruit, both in terms of its history and its physical characteristics. With the world’s largest pomegranate collection in danger of

being lost forever, IPGRI has launched an initiative to enhance the conservation and use of the species.

Native to Persia, pomegranate has been known to humanity longer than nearly any other fruit. Historical evidence suggests that people first planted pomegranate trees between 4000 and 3000 B.C. Eventually, the pomegranate found its way to Asia, North Africa, and Mediterranean Europe. The fruit traveled to Italy via Carthage, from whence it came to be known as the Punic Apple

by the Romans (because Punica was the Roman name for Carthage). Today, the fruit’s botanical name is Punicum granatum—granatum referring to the many seeds or grains in the fruit. It was the Moors who brought the pomegranate to Spain around 800 A.D. They named the city of Granada after their word for pomegranate; the fruit later became a national emblem. King Henry VII himself planted the first pomegranate in Britain. And the hand grenade was given the French name of the fruit it initially resembled.

Pomegranate fruits are usually consumed fresh but are also processed into a juice known as grenadine. Other parts of the plant can be used for tanning leather and as a source of dye for wool and silk. The tree is often grown as an ornamental. Currently, pomegranate is cultivated all over the world in tropical, subtropical and temperate zones. Pomegranate growers around the world produce about 800,000 tons of fresh fruits annually. Yet, in common with many important crops, today, wild populations of pomegranate face erosion while the continued existence of collections of pomegranate diversity is threatened by

economic and technical constraints.

The largest pomegranate collection in the world was established in 1934 in Turkmenistan at the Garrygala Experimental Station for Plant Genetic Resources by the famed Russian scientist N.I. Vavilov. Today, over 1000 accessions of pomegranate are maintained at Garrygala in field genebanks. The material was collected from 27 countries on four continents. The collection contains material with economically-valuable traits and qualities that are important for breeding; these include resistance to frost and sunburn, high yield, large seeds, taste, high vitamin C content, high juice yield, thin peel, long shelf life, and resistance to pests and diseases.

Following the break up of the former Soviet Union, the Garrygala station has faced significant difficulties in managing the collection effectively. For instance, although almost one third of the accessions have been characterized, this information has not been properly documented due to lack of funds. Support is needed for soil tillage, fertilization, and irrigation. Decades worth of collecting

data needs to be revised, updated, translated from Russian to English, and made available to users. The collection must be fully characterized, evaluated and documented.

IPGRI is seeking financial support to assist the genebank in Garrygala and rescue its pomegranate collection. The goal is to ensure that this historical fruit—celebrated so long in legend and lore—can be admired and enjoyed far into the future.

By Muhabbat Turdieva, IPGRI

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Collections of ancient crop at risk in Central Asia

The world's largest pomegranate collection is in grave danger due to a lack of stable funding.

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For further information, contact: Muhabbat Turdieva (m.turdieva@cgiar.org)

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Geneflow News

The great Ice Age that accompanied the end of the Tertiary period 1.8 million years ago drastically altered many of the world’s ecosystems. Glacial sheets from polar areas moved onto the continents, crushing forests and forcing plants and animals to adapt or migrate. The Hyrcanian forest ecosystem of Iran however appears to have been out of the range of the glacial sheets. The beech population of the Hyrcanian forests thrived through the glacial period and today may represent an ecological link to the past as well as a startling reserve of genetic diversity.

The Hyrcanian forests cover 1.5 million hectares on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Unlike the European broad-leaved forests, whose distribution was changed by the Ice Age, the Hyrcanian forests

were only indirectly affected by glaciation and therefore maintained greater species diversity. Beech stands are found along a 700 km length of forest ranging in altitude from 680 to 2000 m above sea level and accounting for almost 30% of the tree volume of the Hyrcanian forests. Because of this, the beech stands are the most economically valuable in the Caspian zone and produce most of the timber in Iran.

Dr Parvin Salehi Shanjani of the Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands in Iran recently completed a study of the genetic diversity of beech in the Hyrcanian forests. IPGRI’s Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship Award Programme supported Salehi’s research. Dr Salehi collected buds from thirteen beech populations and, using molecular marker technology, discovered that the genetic diversity of Hyrcanian beech was surprisingly large. “We discovered 10 haplotypes along a 700 km length of forest,” Salehi said. “By

comparison, the beech forests that run along the 1000 km of the Apennines in Italy contain only one haplotype. The diversity in the Hyrcanian beech is quite astonishing.” A haplotype is a set of closely

linked genes that tend to be inherited as a unit.

“We wanted to study the spatial distribution of beech genetic diversity,” said Dr G.G. Vendramin, a scientist at the Forest Tree Breeding Institute in Florence, Italy and the supervisor of Salehi’s project. “At first, I couldn’t believe the amount of diversity we found among the Iranian beech populations. In fact, I had Parvin run the tests again just to be sure.”

Analyzing the genetic diversity of the Hyrcanian beech populations is crucial for their sustainable management. Knowledge of the genetic diversity of beech will be used to establish gene reserves in the most valuable areas of the distribution range. It will also assist in identifying the origin of the wood harvested from the beech stands. This will help the Iranian government to combat the extensive illegal logging taking place in the region.

Because of technological limitations, the two markers used by Salehi were only able to analyze so-called neutral genes which are not linked to traits indicating adaptation to particular climatic conditions. “The next step is to analyze the adaptive genes to discover how beech has adapted to varying environmental

conditions over the years,” said Vendramin. “With this information, we can use the beech genes as the foundation for important genetic work, such as breeding drought and pathogen resistance into other species.”

“We want to know why populations located so

close together are so clearly different genetically,” Vendramin added. “Knowledge of the genetic makeup of these beeches will let us answer questions about the environmental history and the geography of the region. We are very happy.”

by Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

Ice age beech range scores high in diversity

Stands of beech trees in the Hyrcanian forests of Iran exhibit surprising diversity, possibly because they were only indirectly affected by glaciation during the Ice Age.

Molecular marker techniques were used to examine beech buds, revealing the extent of diversity in the forests.

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About the Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship Fund

IPGRI established the Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship Fund in 1989 to commemorate the unique contributions to plant science of Academician Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov and Sir Otto Frankel. Vavilov was one of the first scientists to recognize the value of genetic diversity in domesticated crop plants and their wild relatives to crop improvement. Frankel was an early advocate of the importance of land-races for plant breeding. He also played a major role in raising international awareness of the urgency of conserv-ing crop diversity.

To date, 24 scientists from 18 developing countries have received awards to carry out innovative research related to the conservation and use of plant genetic resources out-side of their home countries for a period of three months to one year. The Fellowships are awarded annually by the IPGRI Board of Trustees. A call for applications is usually made around July, with a closing date for applications in November. Selected Fellows are announced in April.

The Fellowships are supported by the Grains Research and Development Corporation in Australia and Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., a DuPont Company.

For further information, see: http://www.ipgri.cgiar.org/training/vavilov.htm or contact Evelyn Clancy, IPGRI, e.clancy@cgiar.org

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Local governments in Latin America used to have little power beyond performing simple civil actions such as giving out birth certificates or collecting garbage. Now, mayors and town councils are increasingly taking initiatives in an unlikely field: forest management.

Latin American governments are being pressured to

decentralize their forest management policies to local municipalities, according to a recent book. “Municipal Forest Management in Latin America” describes the experiences of six Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The book was edited by Lyes Ferroukhi and published by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Development Research Centre.

Historically, forest management and regulation have been the responsibility and privilege of central governments throughout Latin America. But both their failure to guarantee the sustainable management of forests and their tendency to monopolize forest-related income has led to movements by local governments and citizens for greater control. The book explores the risks and opportunities that decentralization offers. It also addresses a number of questions. What factors have motivated decentralization of forest management to municipalities, and how has this process gone in practice? Does decentralization put forests at risk or could it foster more

sustainable management? What concrete experiences of municipal management exist that could contribute ideas to the design of new and better forest decentralization policies?

Each of the six countries studied has taken a different approach to decentralization. In Honduras, the local governments were actually made the owners of the forests on their lands; these account for 28% of the nation’s forests. In Bolivia, the Forestry Law of 1996 gave municipal governments the right to allocate up to 20% of the national forests on their land to local user groups. Other countries give the municipal governments varying degrees of rights and responsibilities for managing forests. Even where national forestry institutes have resisted decentralization, some local governments have begun to play an important role in forest management.

The case studies draw mixed conclusions, with positive results often tempered by a recognition of the risks of such transfers of power. For example, though decentralization assists local citizens and environmental groups, it can also bolster the power of local elite figures or anti-conservation

groups. The book also notes that local governments are often not given sufficient financial resources to effectively manage their forests. Finally, the technical capabilities of the municipal governments are often inadequate.

Despite this, the overall message is a cautiously positive one. Though much work remains to be done, it is clear that the right kind of decentralization can provide a better balance between the powers of central and local governments for the good of local communities.

By Ben Rosenberg, IPGRI

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Latin American governments decentralize forest management

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A new book examines forest management in Costa Rica and five other countries in Latin America. Braulio Carrilo National Park, Costa Rica.

For more information on CIFOR, visit the Web site at www.cifor. cgiar.org

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Stretching 850 square kilometres from southern Kenya’s Amboseli region to Nairobi National Park, which borders the city of Nairobi, the Kitengela Corridor is one of the last great wildlife migration routes in East Africa. Wildebeest, zebra, antelope, and other herbivores mingle with the Maasai and their livestock as they make the dry-season trek northwards, spilling onto the green pastures of the Nairobi National Park across its open southern boundary.

In recent years, however, the human population of the Corridor has grown, rangeland has been fenced, and the procession of animals reaching the park has slowed to a trickle. Faced with a loss of prey, the lions that live in the park have increasingly been leaving the park and killing Maasai livestock. The Maasai have generally responded in kind. The escalating situation aroused international concern.

In 2000, The Friends of Nairobi National Park (FoNNaP) made an interesting offer. FoNNaP, an NGO dedicated to supporting the park and the migration that sustains it, inaugurated the Wildlife Conservation Lease Programme. They offered

US$4 per acre per year to landowners on the migration route who were prepared to keep their land open for the passage of wildlife. The herbivorous animals that migrate through Maasai land and enter the Nairobi National Park would provide the carnivorous lions with food, eliminating the need for lions to enter Maasai lands.

The resident Maasai were tempted but cautious. They wanted to gain the maximum economic value from their land but also to ensure that leaving their land open would not diminish their returns from activities such as crop farming. The Maasai turned to the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) for help. ILRI calculated the income available from various options to provide the Maasai with an economic profile of their land.

It was difficult to quantify the value of the wild animals. To do so, ILRI assessed the value of the animals to various stakeholders. Governments and safari companies derive income from the animals. East African wildlife also engenders sympathy and concern around the world. But to the Maasai, the wild animals are costly. The lions

eat their livestock, and the herbivores consume their livestock’s food.

ILRI concluded that FoNNaP’s offer would effectively double the income of poor households when they are most vulnerable in a drought year. It would give many families the opportunity to pay their largest but most important bill—school fees. Many of those to receive education for the first time would be girls. ILRI research also showed that the grazing habits of the wildlife could actually benefit the livestock. For example, constant ‘mowing’ of the grass by certain animals can create a ‘grazing lawn’ of high-quality, rapidly growing grass. As ILRI ecologist Robin Reid observed, “conventional wisdom says that the best way to conserve wildlife is to separate it from people, but in the East African context, this thinking may be seriously flawed.”

At least 117 Maasai families, representing 8500 acres, or 4 percent of the Corridor, are currently participating in the programme. The Kitengela programme, with its innovative blend of community empowerment and wildlife conservation, has attracted the attention of those facing similar

challenges in other countries. With focused effort, it is clear that humans and animals can live together in peace and security.

By John Dawson for ILRI

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Can the lion lie down with the lamb?

John Dawson is a freelance writer based in Nairobi For more information, contact:Patti Kristjanson, ILRIEmail: p.kristjanson@cgiar.org or vist ILRI’s Web site at www.ilri.cgiar.org

Over 100 Maasai families are participating in the Kitengela Corridor programme.

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Subsistence farmers on the island of Makira in the south east Solomon Islands had no idea that their hundreds of varieties of local bananas could be of interest to anyone else. In fact, Makira farmers are shy about their banana eating habits. While everyone in Melanesia eats bananas and plantains, the Makirans rely on the crop to such an extent that neighbouring islanders teasingly call them "huki" after their favourite food.

To ensure that they will always have access to bananas, the Makirans established three field collections with the help of a grant from The Seed Savers' Network in Australia. One of the collections is held at the Manivovo Training Centre on the coast of the island and is administered by the school principal, Brother Francis Vehi. The other two are highland collections located about two days' walk from Manivovo.

Makira has only ten kilometres of dirt roads, so the first collecting expedition—in March 2002—was made by motorized canoe. Villages with radio access were invited to donate their ancestral banana suckers to the collections. Isolated communities delivered their local varieties wrapped in woven coconut fronds and banana leaves.

Students from the Training Centre gave enthusiastic assistance to the establishment of the collections. They were asked to bring ten suckers each from their villages to donate to the school. They documented the names and provenances of all varieties. Later, the students took some of the suckers home to share with their families.

Dorothy Tamasia, of the Kastom Garden Association is the barefoot curator of the two highland collections. Dorothy has been trained in the use of scientific descriptors and is passing her skills on to the students. They are paid US$2 for each variety they describe. Fifty- five out of 108 varieties

have been characterized so far using local names such as "three heads" and "eight heads" (referring to multi-headed bunches) or "five minutes" (referring to cooking time).

Makiran farmers have taken a great interest in the collections. Tamasia has already been able to restore a number of lost varieties to farmers. “I am very happy that people can come to our collection to find varieties that are new to them as well as varieties that for whatever reason may have been lost,” Tamasia said.

Visiting the three collections is not for the faint hearted. It takes a full day's walk through mangroves and steep rainforests involving more than twenty river crossings.

The establishment of the Makiran collections has brought pride to the island and a finer sense of the value of their traditional banana varieties. Thanks to barefoot curators of crop diversity like Dorothy Tamasia, living in difficult and extremely remote circumstances, the huki can have their bananas and eat them too.

By Michel Fanton, Seed Savers’ Network

Banana diversity

Dorothy Tamasia curates the two highland banana collections

Dorothy explains the use of scientific descriptors to students from the Manivovo Training Centre

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For more information, contact:Seed Savers’ NetworkPO Box 975Byron Bay, NSW 2481, AustraliaPh: 61 2 6685 7560 / 6685 6624Email: jude@seedsavers.net Website: www.seedsavers.net

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