@農자료창고

청양고추가 맵다지만 세계에는 그보다 훨씬 매운 고추들이 많다. 말 그대로 '번데기 앞에서 주름 잡지 말' 일이다.

멕시코와 인도에도 매운 고추가 있기로 유명하지만, 현재 세계에서 가장 매운 고추는 미국에서 재배되는 품종이라고 한다.

그런데 도대체 왜?

이렇게 매운 고추을 개발한 것이냐. 미친 것 아니냐!

오늘은 극장에 가서 인터스텔라라는 영화를 보았다.

그런데 세상에나... 처음 도입부부터 깜짝 놀라지 않을 수가 없었다.

영화의 배경이 농부가 최고인 시대가 아닌가!

인간들의 무슨 잘못인지는 몰라도 황진 현상이 심각해져 호흡기에 문제가 발생하기 시작하고, 더 이상 식량생산이 힘들 정도로 병해충이 만연한 시대가 되었다.

그래서 다른 무슨 직업보다 농부가 최고인 세상이 된 것이다.

20세기 초반, 미국에서 심각한 문제였던 황진지대가 그 배경인 듯하다. 황진지대에 대해서는 여기를 참조하시길...

더 이상 농사지을 수 없는 지구를 떠나 농사가 가능한 새로운 행성의 흙을 찾아 떠나는 인터스텔라.

결국 인터스텔라는 흙에서 시작해 흙으로 끝나는 영화라고 할 수 있다. 그런 맥락에서 다른 여러 행성 가운데 토성 근처에 웜홀이 존재한다고 설정된 것도 그 때문이 아닐까?

그런데 영화에서는 옥수수에 심각한 병해충이 돌아 앞으로는 다른 작물들처럼 옥수수조차 재배할 수 없게 된다고 해놓고서는 몇 십 년이 지난 시점에도 여전히 옥수수만 재배하고 있다. 이건 놀란 감독이 간과한 부분은 아닌지. 새로운 품종이라도 개발된 것인지, 아니면 병해충 문제를 해결한 것인지 감독의 설명이 필요하다.

그리고 왜 무시무시한 황진지대를 만드는 대규모 단작 방식의 농사가 여전히 계속되는 것인지도 의문이다. 

우주여행도 하는 시대에 사람들이 너무 멍청한 것 아닌가. 이건 너무 무리한 설정 같다. 그 시대에 그 정도 기술력이면 그런 문제는 해결할 수 있을 것 같은데 말이다.

아무튼 인터스텔라는 농업 영화라고 할 수 있다.

마치며... interstellar라는 제목을 나중에 찾아보니 inter+stellar이다. inter는 ~의 사이라는 뜻이고, stellar는 별이라는 뜻이니.. '별 사이'라는 말이 되겠다. 웜홀과 블랙홀을 통해 별과 별 사이를 왔다갔다 하는 내용이니 딱 어울리네.

감자는 품종에 따라 찌거나 부쳐먹기 좋은것이 있는 반면 튀김용,스넥용으로 좋은게 따로 있다.

식탁에 흔히 오르는 감자는 미국에서 수입된 '수미(Superior)'다.

1975년 국내에 도입돼 적응시험을 거쳐 1978년부터 식용 및 가공용으로 장려되었다. 

 '대서(Atlantic)' 품종은 1976년 미국에서 칩 가공용으로 육성돼 1982년부터 국내에서 부분적으로 이용돼 왔다. 

오리온은 1980년대 말부터 이 품종을 '선농'이란 이름으로 썼다. 이후 농업진흥청 산하 고령지농업연구소에서 '대서'라는 이름으로 품종 등록 되었다. '대서'는 일반 감자에 비해 고형분이 많고 맛이 좋은 편이다. 하지만 장기간 저장하기에 적합하지 않고 역병에 대한 저항력이 강하다.

감자 가운데가 별 모양으로 '할로하트(Hallow heart)"가 생기거나 열을 받앗을때 단면에 먹점이 생기는 것도 단점이다.

이런 단점을 보완해서 오리온 감자연구소가 한국형토질과 지형에 맞게 생산한 감자 품종이 '두백'이다.

연구소는 1991년 외국품종인 '노르댁(NORDACK)'과 USDA품종 중 B5141-6의 수술과 암술을 교작해 만든 "트랜트(Trent)"라는 품종을 캐나다에서 도입했다.

국내에서 이 품종의 생산력과 지역시험을 하다가 돌연변이가 나왔다. 이를 분리 선발하여,생장점 배양으로 만든게 전분량이 많고 튀김용으로 품질이 좋은 "두백"이다. 

전분 함량은 수미에 비해 3-4% 밖에 높진 않지만 이 작은 차이 덕분에 튀겼을 때 탄맛이 없고 고소하다고 한다. 

처음엔 '두백' 품종의 꽃이 하얗다고 해서 '백두(白頭)'로 명명하려 했으나 살표 등록이 안돼 두백으로 바꾼 것이다. 두백은 외부 환경에 강하고 열 때문에 갈변하거나 잘랐을때 중심이 쪼개지는 경우가 드물다.  감자Y 바이러스에는 강하지만 내서성이 적고 척박지에서 생육이 저조하다는 단점이 있다. 

남작은 분이 너무 많이 나서  쪄먹으면 좋았지만 반찬으로 사용하기에는 너무 으스러져서 좋지가 않다. 

수미는 그에반해서 쪄서 바로먹으면 좋지만 좀 지나면 딱딱해진다. 

두백은 이 두품종이 합친거라 생각하면 된다. 쪄먹으면 파실파실해서 맛있고 반찬해서 먹어도 아주 맛이좋다.

http://m.blog.daum.net/_blog/_m/articleView.do?blogid=0aH9d&articleno=40

작물의 야생종이 중요한 까닭은?

역시나 유전적 다양성 때문이다.

그러나 현대의 농업은 산업화의 과정을 거치면서 지나치게 획일화, 단일화되고 있다. 

그로 인해 혹시라도 발생할 사태가 우려스럽다.

 
그래서 토종이라도 열심히 보전하고 퍼뜨려야 하지 않을까 한다.

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Nora Castañeda is a PhD student in Biosciences and is part of the Crop Wild Relatives team of CIAT. In this ‘coffee with’ she explains what this team is about, the projects they are working on and their collaboration with other themes within and outside of CIAT.

“Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) are like the ‘ugly cousins’ of the crops as we know them, with differentiating traits useful for agriculture”. These relatives live in or near disturbed agricultural areas, usually not depending on human intervention to ensure their survival. Understanding CWR is important for agriculture as these species can have some characteristics that might be useful for improving the crops that we depend upon, especially now that agriculture is facing challenging conditions such as climate change and reduced availability of inputs as water and fertilizers.

When humans once started the process of plant domestication, genetic diversity of the resulting cultivated species was narrowed as a consequence. However there are many other species that our ancestors didn’t pick. These other species contain genes that have allowed them to grow under harsher climates, including drought prone regions, soils with high contents of salts or aluminum and extreme temperature variations.

Plant breeders require sources of pest and disease resistance, tolerance to heat and drought, among other abiotic stresses, as well as higher contents of micronutrients and quality related traits.  Some of these traits can be found hidden within old and modern varieties of these crops, as well as within the wild relatives of crops (CWR), as long as this material is conserved and available in plant genebanks.

This conservation is of main importance and it is therefore that “the main objective of the work we do is to target the wild relatives needing urgent ex situ conservation, collect them and prepare them for their use in breeding” (for more info, click here). This way, the closest wild relatives of important crop species will be safeguarded, ensuring that important characteristics are conserved and can be used in adapting agriculture to climate change.

“From CIAT-DAPA we intend to give information on the priorities of which species to safeguard and the sites where to collect this plant material”. Through the ‘Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives’ (CWR Project), about 1000 CWR species were assessed, identifying priorities for collection and regions where each of them are naturally distributed. “One of the main tools developed over the past three years is aCrop Wild Relative Global Atlas”. This Atlas provides the opportunity to explore distributions and conservation concerns in geographic regions, crop gene pools, or particular CWR species of interest.

Using maps of the species found as priorities, Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership is preparing Seed Collecting Guides to provide collectors in the field with as much information as possible about these wild plants, so that they are able to find them and collect their seeds: the collecting guide contains a description of what the target plants look like, when they are going to have ripe seeds, where they are found, and also has some photos to help identification.

Although the information we have gathered is massive, there will always be some gaps and some areas in which more research and action would be necessary. “We research about 80 crops. The majority of these crops are for food security, but there is also another group: the group of crops that generate income, such as coffee and tea. It would be great to receive more information on that group. Also, right now we only work with one type of forage, but it would be interesting to include more crops from tropic forages, to be able to include this information and highlight the need to conserve these seeds also gene banks“.

CWR is a pretty cross-cutting theme. “Centers and teams we work with are: The International Potato Center (CIP) (we are refining our analysis with additional data provided by them, preparing publications out of the analysis made and they are using this information to set priorities for collections); the University of British Columbia (we are using our results and merging it with genetic information for the sunflowers), the Centre for Genetic Resources in the Netherlands (for the lettuce) and the Natural History Museum (for the eggplant and tomato).

Within CIAT we work closely with Julian Ramirez, who first designed the gap analysis methodology. We also collaborate with the team of Terra-I: it is interesting and necessary to see how the changes in vegetation detected by Terra-I, affect the populations of some of the wild relatives in the region. The same goes for the team of climate change. Crop wild relatives give us the flexibility of mashing-up with other topics and finding other interactions with other specialized knowledge”.

More efforts are needed to highlight the importance of conserving CWR in target groups as conservationists, policymakers and the general public. They are a perfect example of elements from biodiversity with real and potential uses.

Crop Wild Relatives is a research team within the Decision and Policy Analysis group of CIAT. This group is made up of: Nora Castañeda, Colin Khoury, Harold Achicanoy, Chrystian Sosa and Alex Castañeda

For pictures look at this Flickr Album

Further Reading:

http://www.nature.com/news/weeds-warrant-urgent-conservation-1.13422?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20130723

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7456/full/499023a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20130704

http://www.scidev.net/global/food-security/feature/could-crop-ancestors-feed-the-world-.html

http://dapa.ciat.cgiar.org/how-much-are-crop-wild-relatives-worth/

http://dapa.ciat.cgiar.org/collecting-crop-wild-relatives-lessons-from-the-field/

http://dapa.ciat.cgiar.org/filling-the-gaps-seed-collecting-for-the-future/

These Madagascar bananas could be next.

During harvest last year, banana farmers in Jordan and Mozambique made a chilling discovery. Their plants were no longer bearing the soft, creamy fruits they’d been growing for decades. When they cut open the roots of their banana plants, they saw something that looked like this:

A banana plant ravaged by Tropical Race 4.

Scientists first discovered the fungus that is turning banana plants into this rotting, fibrous mass in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Since then the pathogen, known as the Tropical Race 4 strain of Panama disease, has slowly but steadily ravaged export crops throughout Asia. The fact that this vicious soil-borne fungus has now made the leap to Mozambique and Jordan is frightening. One reason is that it’s getting closer to Latin America, where at least 70% of the world’s $8.9-billion-a-year worth of exported bananas is grown. 

Randy Ploetz, professor of plant pathology at University of Florida who discovered Tropical Race 4, says it may already be in Latin America. “The story on the Mozambique situation was that workers brought over to establish the plantations—some of them were from Latin America,” he says. “And this is an insidious disease in that it can move… by soil-contaminated machinery, tools—that kind of thing.” 

Chiquita, the $548-million fruit giant with the world’s largest banana market share, is downplaying the risk. “It’s certainly not an immediate threat to banana production in Latin America [where Chiquita's crops are],” Ed Lloyd, spokesman for Chiquita, told the Charlotte Business Journal in late December, explaining that the company is using a “risk-mitigation program” to approach the potential spread. 

Even if it takes longer to arrive, the broader ravaging of the commercial banana appears inevitable. And we don’t need to imagine what that would mean for banana exports—the exact scenario has already happened. Starting in 1903, Race 1, an earlier variant of today’s pathogen, ravaged the export plantations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Within 50 years, Race 1 drove the world’s only export banana species, the Gros Michel, to virtual extinction. That’s why 99% of the bananas eaten in the developed world today are a cultivar called the Cavendish, the only export-suitable banana that could take on Race 1 and live to tell. 

Over the half-century it took to wipe out the Gros Michel, Race 1 caused at least$2.3 billion in damage (around $18.2 billion in today’s terms.) And that was in the commercial heart of global banana production. Tropical Race 4, by comparison, has damaged $400 million in banana crops in the Philippines alone. 

But the bigger difference now is that, compared its 20th-century cousin, Tropical Race 4 is a pure killing machine—and not just for Cavendishes. Scores of other species that are immune to Race 1 have no defenses against the new pathogen. In fact, Tropical Race 4 is capable of killing at least 80%—though possibly as much as 85%—of the 145 million tonnes (160 million tons) of bananas and plantains produced each year, says Ploetz.

And at $8.9 billion, bananas grown for export are only a fraction of the $44.1 billion in annual banana and plantain production—in fact, bananas are the fourth-most valuable global crop after rice, wheat, and milk. Where are the rest of those bananas sold? Nearly nine-tenths of the world’s bananas are eaten in poor countries, where at least 400 million people rely on them for 15-27% of their daily calories. And that’s the really scary part. Since the first Panama disease outbreak, bananas have evolved from snacks into vital sustenance. And this time there’s no back-up banana variety to feed the world with instead.

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Tropical Race 4′s global reach. Note that while Race 1 is in many more places, far fewer banana varieties are susceptible.Banana Research

Meet the Cavendish: the world’s multi-billion-dollar banana

Quick—think of a banana. Chances are good that, you’re imagining something closer to what’s on the right, and not the left:

On the left, Musa velutina, on the right the Cavendish.Left image by Flickr user Wendy Cutler; right image by 24oranges.nl.

That iconic yellow one is a Cavendish. Americans love it so much that they buy more bananas than apples and oranges combined. It might be the most famous, but Cavendishes make up less than half of the bananas grown around the world. The fuzzy, stubby pink bunch on the left—a Musa velutina—is an example of the incredibly diverse range of banana species that grow around the world.

Native to Assam, India, Musa velutinas are much softer and sweeter than Cavendishes. So why don’t we see Musa velutinas—or other species—in developed world supermarkets? Quality control is one; since they reproduce, the Musa velutinas vary in size and shape. Plus, the pink fruit’s hard seeds can nick a filling. And they’re not as “productive” as Cavendishes—meaning, they produce less volume of fruit per plant. Cavendishes also take a long time to ripen and have tough exteriors, which allow them to travel far without going bad or getting banged up along the way.

These Philippines bananas don’t look much like the Cavendish.

In the same way that the Cavendish gets all the fame, brand names like Chiquita and Dole dominate the popular conception of the banana market. But exports make up only 15% of global output; the rest is consumed by banana-producing nations or sold unofficially in regional markets. In fact, the top two banana and plantain producers—India and China—don’t export at all, though they produce a combined 35% of the global yield.

The developed world prizes bananas as a food of convenience—it’s cheap, portable and reasonably healthy. In poor countries, however, bananas are often a basic source of nourishment for at least 400 million people. The average person in Uganda, Gabon, Ghana and Rwanda relies on bananas and plantains for more than 300 calories each day—around 16% of the UN’s nourishment threshold (and bear in mind that around 20% of the 74 million people living in those four countries are undernourished). Roughly 70% of all bananas consumed locally are vulnerable to Tropical Race 4.

And while millions of farmers feed their families with home-grown bananas, many millions more use income from growing them to buy other crops.Bananas are the most important export commodity for Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize. They’re in the top three in Colombia, the Philippines, Guatemala, Honduras, and Cameroon. That’s a lot of the developing-world economy reliant on a very vulnerable crop. “This disease is a problem, not only because of its potential impact on the price and availability of our favorite fruit, but also because it’s a life-changing event for the people in developing countries who rely on bananas as a staple food and incomes,” Alice Churchill, a scientist studying plant biology at Cornell University, told the Cornell Sun, “Those affected by [Panama disease] lose both their livelihoods and an important source of nutrition.”

The deadliest disease the banana world’s ever seen

Panama disease is so virulent that some call it the “HIV of banana plantations” (paywall). Here’s why it’s so lethal:

• It strikes from inside the plant. The yellowing leaves are often the first thing farmers notice. That happens because Tropical Race 4 creeps into a banana plant’s roots, spreading up its vascular system and strangling the supply of water and nutrients. As the banana plant’s leaves wilt, it becomes harder and harder to conduct photosynthesis, leaving its fruits stunted. Eventually the plant simply dies.
• Nothing can kill it. There are other big, bad banana-killers out there. Some, like Black Sigatoka and burrowing nematode worms, sound as nasty as they are (some, like a nefarious Asian virus called Bunchy Top, don’t.) But spray all of those with enough chemicals and they back off. Not so with Panama disease. once a plantation has it, nothing gets rid of it.
• It’s stealthy. The thing clings to shoes, equipment, luggage, or whatever else touches contaminated dirt, making it incredibly contagious. All it takes is one clump of soil to spread Tropical Race 4.
• It plays a long game. Dead plants leave behind spores, allowing the fungus to lie dormant in the ground for decades in wait for new crops to blight.
• It’s confusing. The one proven prophylactic is rigorous quarantine, which Australia has implemented to good effect. A big worry with Latin America at the moment is that, because Tropical Race 4 causes symptoms that look like the old kinds of Panama disease—Race 1 and 2, which are still present in Latin America—farmers might not realize their crops are infected until it’s too late to quarantine, says University of Florida’s Ploetz.
• And Tropical Race 4 is way deadlier than Race 1. When Race 1 wiped out the Gros Michel, the volume of other banana species also susceptible was small. How things have changed. As much as 85% of global banana output is vulnerable to Tropical Race 4.

Tropical Race 4′s route to domination."Fusarium Wilt of Bananas (Panama Disease),"

Before the Cavendish, there was Big Mike

The knitting of our fate with that of Tropical Race 4 began more than a century ago, with a banana far tastier than any most Quartz readers have ever had. While its famously creamy flavor made the Gros Michel—or “Big Mike”—a big hit around the Caribbean among small-time farmers, its tough, thick skin and its high yield are what landed this cultivar in cereal bowls and lunch bags far beyond the tropics.

Like all domesticated bananas, the vast majority of Gros Michel didn’t carry seeds. So how did they reproduce? You simply would cut off a chunk of a banana tree, plant it, and wait for your banana tree to sprout. In other words, the bananas eaten commercially are all clones.

Those qualities also gave rise of the industrialization of banana-growing, as they allowed scrappy American entrepreneurs to construct banana empires throughout Latin American rainforests, often building railroads to ports in exchange for long-term land rights. These banana barons pioneered the industrial agriculture model familiar today, maximizing land, minimizing labor, and vertically integrating in order to send their product far and wide.

The docks of the United Fruit company in Honduras, 1954.

That let them sell Big Mikes for cheap—an important development given that in 1899, the fruit was still found mainly in posh hotels, where it often was accompanied with instructions on how to peel it. That next year, Americans ate around 15 million bunches of bananas. Within a decade that had surged to 40 million, making them more popular than apples and oranges, as Dan Koeppel documents in his book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.At a time when apples and oranges were prohibitively expensive to most Americans, the banana was marketed for mass consumption. United Fruit successfully styled it as the fruit of the common man, its popularity reflected in the slapstick ubiquity of slipping on banana peels found in the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and other comedians, as Koeppel points out.

From there, United Fruit ramped up marketing to further the banana’s American conquest, hiring doctors to endorse mashed bananas as baby food and setting up a “home economics department” to get images of bananas in front of housewives and in textbooks. After its test kitchens struck upon the idea of the banana as the perfect breakfast on the go, the company began offering coupons on cereal boxes, linking bananas and breakfast cereal for the first time, writes Koeppel.

United Fruit marketing from the 1950s ingeniously targeted housewives and children. The image on the left appeared in Ladies Home Journal.Flickr user jbcurio on the left; Flickr user Phil Beard on the right (images have been cropped)

To ramp up production while preserving its margins, United Fruit began burnishing its famously bloody reputation for union-busting. (A 1928 crackdown on striking United Fruit workers in Colombia inspired the massacre in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude). The strategic importance of the crop meant that the troops of both Latin American dictatorships—the namesake of “banana republics”—and the US government often enforced United Fruit’s will on unruly workers.

The twilight of the Gros Michel

However, in 1903, United Fruit encountered an enemy that all the military interventions in the world couldn’t stop. It first showed up in Panama—a blight that wilted leaves and infected fruits until the entire plant toppled over and died, usually before it could bear any fruit. once it appeared, it laid waste to a region’s plantations, usually at a gradual pace, but sometimes with devastating speed. It needed only five years to wipe out all of Suriname’s banana plantations.

Why was Panama disease unstoppable?

In the Gros Michel’s rise and fall, the banana industry struggled with the paradox that plagues all industrial agriculture crops. Natural reproduction is bad for short-term profits. The way to grow a consistent product at yields that achieve economies of scale is to stamp out the risks of diversity and imperfection that happens when genes reshuffle. To boost profit, you then grow that crop to the exclusion of less valuable species.

An eviction of Irish farmers during the potato famine of 1847-1850.

Another notorious monoculture disaster: the Irish Potato Famine

No episode in history illustrates this cost more nightmarishly than the Irish potato blight, “the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly,” as journalist Michael Pollan called it in his book Botany of Desire.

Bananas for sale in Cuba.

So why was there no Latin American Banana Famine?

Panama disease’s scorched earth campaign was briefly terrible for United Fruit and for many Latin American economies. It was frustrating enough for US consumers to have inspired the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” But a tropical reprise of the Irish potato famine it wasn’t.

t might have tasted blander, but the Cavendish is way more productive than the Gros Michel."The Role of Demand in the Historical Development of the Banana Market," Marcelo Bucheli

How did Tropical Race 4 get to be so much deadlier than Race 1?

While United Fruit and Standard Fruit—which soon morphed into Chiquita and Dole, respectively—and other banana giants built booming businesses around Cavendish clones, Panama disease was busy too. The banana industry then did the fungus a huge favor: In the 1980s it launched huge Cavendish plantations in Malaysia, one of the ancient cradles of banana civilization. That’s where University of Florida’s Ploetz thinks Panama disease originally came from.

A fruit market in Lahore.

Tropical Race 4 and a global banana famine

All this might seem alarmist, particularly given how slowly Panama disease typically spreads. Big Banana, for one, would agree with that. “This is something that this industry has dealt with for decades,” said Chiquita’s Ed Lloyd. “It’s not a ‘sky is falling’ sort of situation.”

And while Chiquita and other big banana multinationals shrug off its threat to Latin America, it doesn’t sound like they’re taking into account the possibilities that Ploetz flags, such as the Latin American farmers setting up plantations in the affected Mozambique area. Did they scrub their shoes well enough? Time will tell.

Though the banana panic won’t hit tomorrow, the nature of Tropical Race 4 and the fact that scientists haven’t yet found a viable back-up banana to sub in for the Cavendish means an eventual production collapse is inevitable.

What might that look like? In the crude terms that Pollan invoked with the Irish potato famine, the population that owes much of its survival to cheap, productive banana plants is the one that will shoulder the impact when those plants die. If the same huge numbers of the banana-eating global population are going to stay fed, the only viable solution at the moment may be genetic modification. On that front, there are promising signs, though still nothing to take to the bank. While some find the genetically modified alternative objectionable, it’s hard to argue against modifying an already pretty heavily genetically tweaked fruit given the scale of malnourishment or perhaps even starvation, if that’s what it comes down to.

But the GMO lightning rod distracts from the larger cautionary tale: Our reliance on monoculture to feed surging global populations is catching up with us. International agricultural organizations are already scrambling to find new scourge-resistant substitutes for things like rice and potatoes. In fact, so dire are other global agricultural problems that Tropical Race 4′s onslaught doesn’t even get bananas near the top of priority list. “Getting support to develop new resistant bananas is really tough—there are already so many demands on the international agricultural community,” says Ploetz. “There’s a lot of hunger in the world and bananas just have to get in line behind all those other big problems.”

http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is-killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/#/h/50988,1,2,3/

Central Asia's fruit tree species are invaluable storehouses of genetic diversity with the potential to secure the future of global crops.

This story is part of National Geographic's special eight-month Future of Food series.

An epiphany came to Adrian Newton in the form of an afternoon tea. In 2009, the British forest conservation ecologist was surveying threatened fruit trees in the forests of the western Tien Shan mountains, in the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan, when local residents invited him into their tapestry-bedecked home in the heart of the woods to share a ceremonial meal.

"They sit you down and make you this lovely cup of tea, and then you're served a whole range of different jams and preserves, and all of these are local. They're all made from the forest and [are] absolutely delicious," says Newton, a professor at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom. "That's when it really hit home to me what a fantastic cultural value these forests are. You do feel in a small way that you are in a land of plenty." (Related: "Beyond Delicious.")

The ancient woodlands of Kyrgyzstan—and of the four neighboring former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—are home to more than 300 wild fruit and nut trees. They include walnut trees, eight to ten species of cherry, up to ten species of almond, four or five plum tree species, and four wild species of apple, according to a 2009 report co-authored by Newton, The Red List of Trees of Central Asia.

According to that same report, 44 species of trees and shrubs in the region are "critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable." They've been menaced for decades by overgrazing, pests, diseases, timber—felling for fuel, and most recently, climate change.

One of these threatened species, Malus sieversii—a wild apple that Newton describes as "small but highly colored with a very nice sweet flavor"—is one of the key ancestors of all cultivated apples grown and eaten around the world. So rich and unique is this species, Newton says, that on one wild apple tree, "you can see more variation in apple form than you see in the entire cultivated apple crop in Britain. You can get variation in fruit size, shape, color, flavor, even within the tree, and certainly from tree to tree."

Several thousand years of selective breeding have mined that diversity to give us the varieties we know today, from the Golden Delicious to Cox's Orange Pippin to the improbably named Winter Banana. Just 10 of the 3,000 known varieties account for more than 70 percent of the world's production.

But in the process many traits that might still be valuable—genes for disease resistance, say, or heat tolerance—were left behind. For breeders of apples and other fruits today, tapping the riches of the original Garden has become a practical strategy—and saving it from destruction, Newton says, an urgent necessity.

Malus sieversii has been identified as the wild ancestor of domestic apples.

Apple Knowledge

The Latin noun malus can mean either "apple" or "evil," which is probably why the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" in the Garden of Eden is often depicted as an apple tree, even though the biblical book of Genesis does not say what sort of fruit tree it is.

In 2010, a research team led by Riccardo Velasco of the Edmund Mach Foundation in Trento, Italy, took knowledge of apples themselves to a new level: They sequenced the complete genome of the domesticated apple Malus domestica. It has the highest number of genes—57,000—of any plant genome studied so far, and about 36,000 more genes than humans have.

Velasco's team also identified M. sieversii as the wild ancestor of domestic apples, reporting that it was domesticated in Central Asia some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. But it turns out not to be the only grandma of the Granny Smith.

A 2012 study led by Amandine Cornille, now an ecologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, showed that the domesticated apple acquired genes from other wild varieties as it spread west along the Silk Road. Traveling traders, Cornille explains, unwittingly dispersed cultivated apples by consuming them and excreting their seeds en route, as did their camels and horses.

Cornille and her colleagues in France, Armenia, China, and Russia sampled and sequenced rapidly evolving DNA regions from wild apple species in Siberia and the Caucasus, as well as from Malus sieversiiand Malus sylvestris, the wild European crab apple. Some of these wild apple trees, they note, bear "small, astringent, tart fruits," yet had more valuable traits as well, including pest and disease resistance or longer storage capacity. The genetic analysis showed evidence of frequent hybridization of domestic apples with wild species. Many of those crossings were probably done deliberately by farmers.

The wild crab apple in particular was a "major secondary contributor" of genes to the modern domesticated apple, according to Cornille, beginning about 1,500 years ago. In fact, the domesticated apple is now more closely related to M. sylvestris than to its original ancestor in the Tien Shan mountains.

According to tree experts from Fauna & Flora International, around 90 percent of the fruit and nut forests of Central Asia have been destroyed in the past fifty years.

Cultivating Diversity

Modern breeders at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, are using both traditional grafting techniques and genetic engineering to continue the work begun by farmers along the Silk Road, melding wild apple genes into domesticated varieties.

In the 1990s, horticulturalist Phil Forsline of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Herb Aldwinckle, a plant pathologist from Cornell, trekked to the forests of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and China on multiple trips to collect seeds and grafts of M. sieversii. According to Thomas Chao, the apples, grapes, and tart cherries curator at USDA/ARS in Geneva, New York, the pair collected 130,000 seeds ofM. sieversii. More than 1,300 M. sieversii seedlings have since been grown in Geneva orchards and screened for disease resistance, drought, cold tolerance, and other traits.

The goal, says USDA plant physiologist Gayle Volk, is to "capture and conserve" the diversity not just of wild apple species in China and Central Asia but also of native species in the U.S. Volk, who describes herself as "very passionate about apples" is based at the ARS National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado, which houses what she describes as a "monstrous vault" storing hundreds of thousands of seeds of many different species. one of Volk's projects is sequencing and fingerprinting the DNA of wild apples to identify genes that may code for disease resistance, crunchiness, or flavor.

"Commercial crops are limited to about 15 different kinds of apples; these are what everyone knows and grows," she says. Yet commercial varieties are under threat not just from the "classic biggies"—fire blight, apple scab, leaf spot—but also from climate change. Apple growers across the U.S. have suffered crop losses in the past few years because of increasingly frequent warm spells in February that wake the trees from winter dormancy.

"The trees flower in March and lo and behold, another snow comes along, and they get clobbered by the snow, and they lose a lot of blossoms and a lot of fruit set, because the climate is not ready to accept baby apples yet," Volk says. one possible solution, she adds, would be to introduce genes from apples adapted to warmer climes, such as the Southeast Asian apple Malus doumeri, or ideally from species that remain dormant during brief warm spells.

Conserving both wild populations and their descendants is "absolutely crucial," adds horticulturalist Susan Brown of Cornell University, who is mining young M. sieversii trees in the Geneva orchards for genes promoting apple scab resistance and nutritional compounds. The Geneva collection, she says, is a "Noah's ark of apples" ferrying potentially valuable mutations or genetic variants into the future.

A bowl of fruit and nuts collected from the forests of Kyrgyzstan.

Protecting the Garden

Adrian Newton and his colleagues have spent the past eight years traveling back and forth to Kyrgyzstan to work with forest ecologists at Kyrgyz National Agrarian University in the capital, Bishkek, to better protect the fruit and nut forests. The challenges are considerable.

An uprising roiled the country in 2010, leading to the overthrow of then President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The breakup of the Soviet Union ended coal subsidies and deliveries, leading to greater dependence on fuel-wood harvested from the forests. Rural residents often lease forest plots from the government, grazing cattle, horses, sheep, and goats in the woodlands.

Some fruit species, including wild apricot, are imperiled by overcollection of seeds by national and international plant-breeding companies. Pretty flowers can also become a liability: The pink blooms of one endangered species of wild almond from Kazakhstan, for example, are "particularly in demand for International Women's Day," according to Newton's report.

Some of the most recent news has been bright, however. In a recently completed field survey in Kyrgyzstan, Newton and Bournemouth colleague Elena Cantarello discovered that seedlings, saplings, and adult trees of M. sieversii, the ancestral apple, were "not as threatened as was originally thought," says Newton, but "still very restricted in extent."

And in one just-published model of species diversity in the Sary-Chelek Biosphere Reserve in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan, Newton and his colleagues found that moderate livestock grazing—not overgrazing—may be beneficial to walnut trees, as it opens sunlit spots for the shade—intolerant trees and patches of bare ground on which new tree seedlings can establish themselves.

Local conservation programs are helping, according to Liesje Birchenough, Eurasia program manager at Fauna and Flora International. FFI, based in Cambridge, U.K., has worked for the past six years with the forest services of both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to protect the forests. The organization has funded nurseries that are cultivating pear and apple species for reforestation, paying for fencing, irrigation, and seeds. It also organizes surveys of rare trees and supports school programs in which teachers take children to the forests to collect seeds and then plant them.

"All of the apples that we're eating today and cultivating originate from this area," Newton says. "So if we want to add genetic variation to our crops to cope with new pests or climate change, then the genetic resource is these forests. It's true for apples, apricots, peaches, walnuts, pears. In terms of a wild genetic resource for cultivated fruit trees, there's nothing like it on the planet."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/apples-of-eden-saving-the-wild-ancestor-of-modern-apples/

몬산토는 멀리 있는 것이 아니다. 바로 우리의 곁에도 존재한다.

농촌진흥청에서 물바구미를 스스로 쫓는 벼를 개발했다고 떠들썩하다.

'BT 옥수수'와 같은 'BT 벼'라고 한다.

이를 가지고 단지 농약을 치지 않는다는 이유로 "친환경적으로" 물바구미를 방제한다고 선전한다.

그런데 과연 농약만 치지 않으면 친환경인가?

자연에 없던 생물이 하나 새로 생겼는데 이건 친환경인가?

근본적인 성찰 없이 기술만 좇는 모습이다. 안타깝다.

---------

살충제를 사용하지 않아도 스스로 해충을 쫓는 벼 품종이 개발됐다.

농촌진흥청(청장 이양호)은 농약 사용없이 친환경적으로 벼물바구미를 방제할 수 있도록 벼에 살충성 유전자를 도입한 ‘벼물바구미 저항성 벼’를 개발했다고 밝혔다.

벼물바구미는 유충의 경우 벼 뿌리에 기생해 농약을 이용한 방제가 어려운 해충이다.

또한 환경에 따라 발생시기가 유동적이고 발생하면 농약을 여러 번 뿌려야 하는 어려움이 있어 해마다 국제 벼 수확량의 20 % 이상이 줄어드는 등 큰 피해를 주고 있다.

이번에 개발한 벼 품종은 토양 미생물인 바실러스균으로부터 유래한 살충성 유전자를 식물형질전환 기술을 이용해 벼 유전자에 삽입해 만든 것이다.
   *바실러스균: Bacillus thuringiensis ssp. tenebrionis (B.t.t.)
실험 결과 ‘벼물바구미 저항성 벼’에서 기존 벼에 비해 벼물바구미 피해 발생이 약 50 % 줄었다.

이에 따라 벼물바구미 방제 작업에 필요했던 연간 농약 사용비용은 약 30%, 노동력 소요비용은 약 20% 줄일 수 있을 것으로 기대한다.

농촌진흥청은 이번에 개발한 ‘벼물바구미 저항성 벼’에 대해 지난 8월 특허를 출원했으며, 학술지 ‘Plant Cell Tissue and Organ Culture’에 논문 게재승인을 받았다.

농촌진흥청 생물안전성과 신공식 박사는 “이번 벼 품종 개발은 앞으로 생산비용은 물론 지나친 농약 사용에 따른 환경오염 등을 해결할 수 있을 것으로 기대한다.”라고 말했다.

[문의] 농촌진흥청 생물안전성과장 조현석, 생물안전성과 신공식 031-299-1128

http://www.agri-history.kais.kyoto-u.ac.jp/East-Asian2008/proceedings.pdf

P-1 岩本純明 (도쿄농업대학)

근대 일본의 공업화와 농업 부문

P-2 구자옥(전남대 명예교수), 이은웅(서울대 명예교수), 이병렬(한국 기상청)

한국의 벼농사 재배 및 품종의 변천사 ―근대화 과정을 중심으로

P-3 王思明(난징농업대학 중화농업문명연구원)

한중일 농업 현대화 비교연구

AI-1 佐藤章夫(토호쿠 대학 대학원)

근세 중・후 농업 수리시설의 부진과 유지관리를 둘러싼 藩과 村 자치 －山形五堰을 사례로

AI-2 박태식(농촌진흥청 작물과학원)

조선반도 삼국(백제・신라・고구려) 유적에서 출토된 탄화미 비교

AI-3 戸石七生(일본학술진흥회), 松尾美希(도쿄대학)

일본 가족은 특이한가? 공업화 이전 시대의 직계가족 제도와 촌락사회

BI-1 劉興林(난징대학)

한대 농전農田 형태 약설

BI-2 大瀧真俊(교토대학 대학원)

전시체제기의 일본에서 '만주'로 이식마移植馬 사업 -홋카이도 농법의 도입에 미친 영향에 대하여

BI-3 黄世瑞(화난사범대학)

민속풍정과 중국 전통농업 사회

AII-1 朴錫斗(한국농촌경제연구원)

한국 근대화 과정에서 농업의 변모

AII-2 野間万里子(교토대학 대학원)

전전 시가현에서 소 비육

AII-3 김미희 외(농촌진흥청 농촌자원개발연구소)

원예의 전통지식과 그 실천적 특성에 관한 평가

BII-1 魏露苓(화난농업대학）

청 말 남해안 지역의 근대화 농업교육 연구 —잠상학당을 중심으로

BII-2 小島 庸平(도쿄대학 대학원)

전쟁 시기 동아시아의 제분업과 밀 시장 ―일본 자본의 '만주' 진출을 중심으로

BII-3 張法瑞(중국농업대학)

중국 농업 현대화 과정 속의 과학과 교육 요소

AIII-1 三浦洋子(치바경제대학）

식민지 시대에 조선 북부의 대농장 경영 -난곡기계농장의 유축전작농업의 실태

AIII-2 안승택(전북대학)

식민지 조선에서 소주밀식小株密植 정책과 농민의 소식疎植 관행 ―역사생태적 지평에서 본 농업기술의 비교문화론

AIII-3 伊藤淳史(교토대학）

전후 일본의 출이민 정책 －농업정책에서의 측면 및 일본계 브라질 이민의 역사적 맥락

AIII-4 金鐘德(사당동 한의원 원장)

대나무의 성질과 효능에 관한 문헌연구

AIII-5 황대룡

한국 농촌 주민의 사회교육 참가에 관한 분석

BIII-1 加藤尚子(국립환경연구소)

한신 대수해 기념지 7책에 관한 비교서지학적 연구

BIII-2 李建萍(중국농업박물관)

근대 중국 귀저우 소황촌의 변천으로 본 민족지구 전통문화 가치의 재발견

BIII-3 中山大将(교토대학）

사할린 음식의 식민지사

BIII-4 李令福(산시사범대학）

환경보호 사업이 어떻게 白城则村의 현실과 미래에 영향을 미쳤는가