Posts

Posted on

The plot thickens

I’m slowly making my way through the open access book “Sustainable Agroecology: Actors, Practices, Experiences and Perceptions,” edited by Javier Becerril García, Paulina Martínez Isidro, Praveen Jha, Elisabeth Tuider, and Andreas Thiel. It’s like 300 pages, so I may be some time.

The book brings together 15 case studies from different authors around the world exploring how agroecological approaches can support rural livelihoods and nutrition, while sustaining agricultural diversity, local knowledge and cultures. Several chapters highlight the role of farmers, particularly women, in maintaining traditional varieties through seed selection, saving and exchange.

One describes the Maya milpa system in Yucatán, where the Three Sisters — maize, beans and squash — are grown alongside other crops and managed as part of a wider landscape of home gardens, fallows and forests. Another examines the remarkable diversity of Mexican home gardens, which can contain more than a hundred plant species and serve as reservoirs of useful plants, many of them threatened.

A particularly interesting example comes from Chiapas, where a group of Indigenous women, the “Guardians of the Seeds”, established a community seed store and organised the conservation and exchange of native crops, combining traditional knowledge with technical support. The book also looks at the revival of underutilised crops in Europe, including bere barley in Orkney and local bean and wheat varieties in Italy and Greece, showing how new markets can help bring neglected diversity back into cultivation.

The authors have relatively little to say about formal genebanks — but that’s ok. The contribution of the book is to underline what genebanks cannot do alone: maintain the knowledge, seed systems, markets and farming practices that keep crop diversity in use and allow it to continue evolving.

Posted on

Brainfood: Gender edition

  • Informality in food environments: a systematic review of nutrition, livelihood, and sociopolitical outcomes and implications for food policy. A review of 327 studies across 64 countries shows women make up the majority of informal vendors, and their businesses are shaped by gendered constraints: eg access to public space, regulation, childcare and personal safety. Food policy needs to recognise informal food environments and address their social and political dimensions, not treat them as peripheral to the formal food system.
  • Role of urban and peri-urban agriculture in nutritional diversity, cultural resilience and community-based food security in an Eastern Himalayan city. A study of 150 households in Imphal, Northeast India, finds that almost all urban households engage in some form of food production, with women managing most of it. Container, rooftop and terrace cultivation help maintain access to a diversity of fresh vegetables and herbs as traditional homestead gardens disappear under urbanisation, contributing significantly to nutritional security, cultural continuity and community resilience.
  • Land tenure as a catalyst: Synergizing gender equality and agrobiodiversity conservation for sustainable development in Asian vulnerable areas. An analysis of 1,089 households across 12 sites in five Asian countries finds that women with secure land tenure manage greater crop species and variety diversity, because they can make independent decisions. The relationship varies considerably among countries and agroecologies, but it seems that strengthening women’s land rights can deliver benefits for both gender equality and agrobiodiversity conservation.
  • The gender dynamics of crop varietal choices in rural Kenya: navigating risk, diversification, and decision-making. Drawing on interviews and focus groups across five Kenyan counties, this study examines how women and men negotiate crop varietal choices in the context of unequal access to resources and climate uncertainty. Both value production characteristics, but women place greater emphasis on processing and consumption qualities, while men tend to prioritise marketability and yield potential. Land ownership, household authority and cultural norms influence whose preferences prevail, with implications for conservation, breeding priorities and seed systems.
  • Gender matters in seed system assessments: evidence from smallholder farms in Morocco, Senegal, and Madagascar. Surveys of 1,054 smallholder farms reveal substantial differences between women’s and men’s accounts of seed management and sourcing practices. Women are systematically underrepresented, partly because researchers commonly interview male household heads and overlook the constraints imposed by women’s care responsibilities. Gender-disaggregated data collection is thus essential for understanding how seed systems actually work, and seed assessments can reproduce the very inequalities they are supposed to measure.
  • Sons or seeds: gender, care work, and agrobiodiversity in translocal households of rural China. Fieldwork in two mountainous Chinese villages explores the dilemma facing rural women who balance caring for family members with maintaining local seeds and agroecological practices. As men migrate for work, women take on more agricultural responsibilities, but are also expected to provide childcare and look after older relatives. Women’s knowledge and labour sustain agrobiodiversity while remaining undervalued and frequently uncompensated. Don’t romanticise women as natural guardians of seeds while overlooking the economic and personal sacrifices involved.
  • Feminist Agroecology and Criollo Hens: Women’s Everyday Resistance in Colombia. The expansion of industrial poultry production in Colombia threatens traditional backyard hen keeping, undermining women’s autonomy and increasing dependence on commercial inputs. However, everyday practices of care, intergenerational knowledge sharing and community cooperation help sustain alternative poultry systems, a form of resistance to industrialisation and an important source of women’s socioeconomic autonomy and community resilience.
  • Preserving Indigenous Peoples’ values and rights in food composition programmes: A call for agreed international guidelines. Food composition research can help broaden understanding of the nutritional value of Indigenous foods, but it also raises questions about who controls the knowledge and how it is used. Drawing on examples from First Nations in Canada, Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, Sámi in Sápmi and Indigenous Peoples in Northeast India, the authors call for participatory approaches grounded in free, prior and informed consent, data sovereignty and access and benefit-sharing. The idea is to ensure that Indigenous Peoples, especially women, are recognised as rights-holders and active knowledge holders, rather than simply sources of information for scientific research.
  • To round things off, here’s a policy brief on Gender and Social Inclusion in Agrobiodiversity Conservation from the CBD Women’s Caucus and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, aimed at the just-concluded COP17 of the CBD.
Posted on

Basil instinct

I don’t know much about Thai cooking. So when I came across a “furore” (no less) over some new varieties of something improbably called holy basil, purporting to be an important ingredient in that country’s cuisine, my first reaction was to wonder whether the whole thing was a joke.

It wasn’t. Holy basil turns out to be Ocimum tenuiflorum, but, unlike the plant itself, the type of controversy it has engendered is fairly familiar to me.

CPRAM, a subsidiary of Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, has secured protection for four new varieties developed for its ready-meal business. The protection was registered in 2024 and runs until 2036. It doesn’t amount to ownership of holy basil: farmers remain free to grow, save and trade traditional varieties, and only commercial propagation of the protected ones needs permission. That has not stopped worries about Thailand’s plant variety protection law, especially the prospect of a move to the stricter UPOV 1991.

The crop itself is more interesting than the argument. It is clearly something I should have known about. It is widely cultivated and culturally important in SE Asia, though its genetic diversity is less well documented than its medicinal properties. An Indian study of 38 accessions found that 91% of the measured molecular variation lay between accessions rather than between geographical regions. Another study of 109 Indian accessions found considerable differences in plant architecture, leaf and seed characteristics, flowering time and essential-oil content. For Thailand, researchers looked at 20 landraces and five commercial cultivars and found substantial variation, with both groups spread across two broad genetic clusters. They did warn that rising demand and farmers’ liking for commercial cultivars could eventually erode local diversity, though they saw no cause for immediate alarm.

There is also more in genebanks than I initially guessed. A search of Genesys turns up 163 accessions, 67 of them from Thailand. Of the total, 82 are listed as available through the Multilateral System of the Plant Treaty, mostly via the World Vegetable Center. Holy basil isn’t an Annex I crop, so those listings are voluntary. Anyone getting material that way signs the Standard Material Transfer Agreement, which includes benefit-sharing obligations if a commercial product incorporates it and isn’t freely available for further research and breeding.

Holy basil was being tended in household gardens and temple courtyards long before anyone thought of registering a variety. Whatever comes of the IPR row, that accumulated diversity is worth protecting. And I want to grow some too.

Posted on

A seed of doubt

Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has soft-launched SeedPOD, the Seed Portal for Online Data, a platform intended to make information about native seed collections, their availability and their propagation easier to find. The ambition is to tackle one of the persistent bottlenecks in ecological restoration: getting the right seed, from the right source, to the right place.

It is an interesting development, and one that fits into a broader restoration workflow I explored in an earlier post on restoration and digital tools. There is another tool that could usefully complement it: the RHS Garden Climate Assessment Tool (GCAT).

The idea is to connect three stages of a practical restoration exercise. First, identify a native species appropriate to the planting location. Then find out whether seed is available from the Millennium Seed Bank or another seed supplier. Finally, check whether the species is likely to remain climatically suitable at the planting site under future climate scenarios. If all goes well, obtain the seed and grow the plants.

I decided to try this with Markhamia obtusifolia, an indigenous African tree that might be an interesting addition to my garden in Nairobi.

The first stop was SeedPOD. Here I found a bit of a discrepancy. The older Millennium Seed Bank seed list website listed three accessions: one from Malawi and two from Botswana. The new SeedPOD interface showed just one accession, held by IIAM (Instituto de Investigação Agrária de Moçambique) in Maputo, and apparently the only one currently available. It is not clear whether this reflects a change in the underlying holdings, a difference in what the two databases display, or simply a difference in how availability is recorded. Either way, it raises a question about how complete and up to date the new interface is.

There was a little more information from BGCI’s PlantSearch, accessible through SeedPOD, which identified 15 ex situ sites holding the species. That suggests that the tree is represented in a reasonable number of living collections, although it does not tell us whether any of them can supply seed. BTW, the links from SeedPOD to GBIF and Genesys did not work when I tried them, and I could not find the promised list of seed suppliers either. So the next step in the workflow — actually finding some seed — remains elusive. (ChatGPT could not find any seed suppliers in Nairobi though it did flag a couple of plausible options for M. lutea.)

At least the climate assessment was more straightforward. Using GCAT, I was able to establish that M. obtusifolia should be climatically suitable for planting in Nairobi under most climate change scenarios. This is a useful check, although it does not settle questions of soil, provenance, or other ecological requirements. Climate suitability is not quite the same thing as ecological suitability.

None of this diminishes the value of SeedPOD’s underlying ambition. Bringing together information previously dispersed information is worthwhile. But the real test is whether a user can move easily and quickly from a species name to a viable source of seed, assess its suitability for a particular restoration site, and eventually get plants into the ground.

My little experiment has not quite completed that journey. SeedPOD helped identify ex situ holdings, and GCAT provided a positive climate-suitability assessment. But the route from a database record to an actual packet of seed is still surprisingly difficult to navigate. A platform intended to connect seed conservation with ecological restoration will ultimately be judged not just by how much information it brings together, but by whether people can use it to get seed into the ground.