Lois Englberger, an American researcher, works with the Island Food Community in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. She spearheads the ‘Lets Go Local’ awareness campaign.

In 1998, an assessment was done to identify local foods that might alleviate the serious emerging problem of vitamin A deficiency in young children in Pohnpei. This was happening because more and more people were abandoning their traditional diets in favour of rice and other imported foods with a much lower nutritional value. An analysis of the local Karat banana, which has deep yellow-orange flesh, showed that it was extremely rich in provitamin A carotenoids, in particular beta-carotene and other nutrients, such as riboflavin (vitamin B₂). Foods rich in provitamin A carotenoids protect against night blindness, infection and ‘weak blood’. Carotenoid-rich foods help protect against chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, which are serious problems in Micronesia.

This prompted the launch of an intensive campaign to promote Karat and other yellow and orange-fleshed banana varieties. Over time, other local foods and varieties were also analyzed and an array of carotenoid-rich foods, including yellow-fleshed giant swamp taro varieties, were identified and promoted as part of the campaign. Government officials, schools and community groups all pitched in to help spread the word about the benefits of local food.

The campaign’s efforts have led people to start discussions about nutrition, and it has started to spread to other islands of the Federated States of Micronesia and other Pacific Island countries as well. There has been a significant increase in consumption of bananas, taro and green vegetables in the target community and awareness relating to local food has increased dramatically as a result of the campaign.

Valeria Negri has devoted her life to the study and conservation of Italy´s crop diversity, a concern of hers ever since she was a small girl. She followed her passion to train as a geneticist and plant breeder and now is passing on that passion to the next generation of scientists. Concerned by the threats facing traditional crop varieties due to urbanization and modern agriculture, Valeria (often with her students in tow) scours the country in search of local types and the knowledge that makes them so valuable. She grows them in her garden and makes seeds available to others to remove any threat of extinction.

For the past 20 years, Valeria has grown a wealth of traditional varieties of crops in her garden: garlic, broccoli, pea, tomato, common bean, beta, rape, artichoke, salad, as well as apricots, apples, cherries, peaches, plum trees and various aromatic herbs. These are heirloom varieties handed down by family or given to her by local farmers.

Valeria has long been a vigorous promoter of the value of household heritage varieties, the importance of their diversity for future needs, and the role they can play in sustaining local economies. She has inspired both her students and her scientific colleagues to take action in their own lives to conserve and use agricultural biodiversity for the benefit of generations to come.

Gregory Levin grew up in Leningrad – now St. Petersburg – and even as a small child, his love of plants and curiosity earned him the name “little botanist”. During the terrible siege of Leningrad from 1941-44, the Germans killed all of the adult males in Gregory’s family. The population was starving and ill. Gregory saved his mother from scurvy by boiling up pine twigs and adding crystals of lemon acid. He faced many adversities—poverty and quotas against Jews among them—to earn his doctoral degree and begin his life’s work as a roving plant explorer.

For more than forty years, Dr Levin trekked across Central Asia and the Trans Caucasus in search of wild and endangered pomegranates. At Garrigala, a remote agricultural station in Turkmenistan Dr. Levin developed and tended the world’s largest collection of pomegranate varieties, as well as persimmons, walnuts, figs, olives, apricots, almonds, quince, peaches, figs and jujubes. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, funding from Moscow evaporated and Dr Levin was exiled from his collection of 1117 pomegranates.

With no more than their modest belongings and scientific knowledge to begin a new life, the Levins moved from their home of forty years to Israel. The leadership of Garrigala fell to a Turkmen agricultural director with no budget who resorted to ripping out precious trees and replacing them with vegetable cash crops to sustain the compromised collections. Fortunately, having the end of the Soviet Union, Dr Levin sent 60 of Garrigala’s best pomegranate varieties to Israel, and to the United States

His memoir Pomegranate Roads: A Botanist’s Exile from Eden is a unique botanical, geographical, medical, even mythological history of Punica granatum—the original ‘apple’ in the Garden of Eden, according to Dr. Levin.

Nikolai Ivanovitch Vavilov was an extraordinarily gifted agriculturalist and academic. Born in Moscow 1887, he is probably best known for his discovery of the centres of origin of cultivated plants.

While developing his theory on the centres of origin of cultivated plants, Vavilov organized a series of expeditions to collect seeds from every corner of the globe. He created the world’s largest collection of plant seeds at the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad, where he was director from 1921-1940. This seedbank was carefully protected during the 28 month siege of Leningrad from 1941-1944. As starvation raged through the city, killing thousands of citizens, many workers at the seedbank slowly starved to death, surrounded by thousands of packs of the seeds of rice, peas, corn and wheat. They chose death in order to keep the collection safe.

Vavilov repeatedly criticized the pseudo-scientific concepts of scientist Trofim Lysenko. Far more politically astute than Vavilov, Lysenko managed to have his rival imprisoned in 1940, charged with wrecking Soviet agriculture. Shortly after his arrest, Vavilov’s health deteriorated rapidly and he died in prison. He was one of thousands of Soviet geneticists to be wiped out in the Stalinist purges.

Today, Vavilov is recognized as the foremost plant geographer of contemporary times. The All-Union Institute of Plant Industry was named after him in 1967. The N.I. Vavilov Institute in Plant Industry in St Petersburg still maintains one of the world’s largest collections of seeds.

Mrs. Sanaa Abdul Wahab Al-Sheikh joined the Iraqi national genebank in Abu Ghraib in 1988. “This is when I discovered what I wanted to do with my life,” she said. By 1994, Mrs. Sanaa´s hard work had paid off and she was promoted to the position of Head of Plant Genetic Resources.

Aware of the growing tensions in the country, Mrs. Sanaa decided to take some precautions to ensure that the material conserved in the Abu Ghraib genebank would be kept safe in the event of war. “I took the most important accessions to my house and hid them in my fridge. I also buried accessions in the office garden. I prepared sealed bags of accessions and buried them in a hole and then covered the hole with grass and plants to ensure that they were well hidden.”

“During the war, things were very difficult. There was no fuel and no electricity, making it difficult for me to get to the office and to do my work, but I kept on going anyway. Then on the 9th April 2003, the security situation deteriorated to such an extent that I was forced to stay home for a whole week,” recounted Mrs. Sanaa.

When Mrs. Sanaa returned to the office a week later on foot, she was stunned to find that the genebank had been looted and destroyed. “I cried so much when I saw what they had done,” she recalled. “The first thing I did was rush to check that the accessions were still safely buried in the garden.” Fortunately they were, and Mrs. Sanaa made sure that they were safely hidden by covering them with more plants and grass.

By 2004, the State Board for Seed Testing and Certification began works to reconstruct the genebank. Mrs. Sanaa scoured farmers fields around the country collecting hundreds of accessions to rebuild the collection. Along with about a thousand accessions she had saved from the old collection, these now make up the new collection at the Iraqi national genebank at Abu Ghraib, where Mrs. Sanaa continues to work today.

Suzanne Arregger is an English botanist who has lived in Trentino, Italy since 1963. In 1994, a volunteer tomato plant appeared in Arregger’s kitchen garden. She first assumed that it was the heirloom red ribbed variety “Mexican Ribbed” that had recently been given to her by a member of the US Seed Saver’s Exchange in California. But instead of having red fruits, the plant produced bright yellow tomatoes of different shapes and sizes. She called these tomatoes “Golden Gazzi” after the name of the area where she lives and the colour. Each year since then, Arregger has harvested the progeny of the Golden Gazzi, growing them the following year and selecting the more interesting fruits from the healthiest plants. In order to improve the carotene content of her yellow tomatoes, she crossed them with a high carotene orange tomato. The crosses she made gave her a whole range of new colours, including tangerine, orange and apricot coloured fruits. Over the years, while cultivating her Golden Gazzi range of tomatoes, Arregger has accumulated the seed of a great many other tomato varieties, which she grows alongside the original plants. Today, Arregger grows 65 varieties of tomato in her garden.

W.S. Merwin is one of America’s most distinguished poets and the recently appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. He is also a Guardian of Diversity who maintains a forest of threatened trees and plants at his home on Maui.

Born in 1927, Merwin has written over 30 books of poetry and prose. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, most recently in 2009 for his poetry collection, “The Shadow of Sirius.” Merwin writes extensively about the relationship between human beings and the natural world. And the poet is as positive an example of that relationship as you’ll find. Merwin moved to Hawaii in 1976 to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. He settled on a former pineapple plantation in Maui where he found the land greatly depleted after years of logging and agriculture. A passionate environmentalist, Merwin dedicated himself to the restoration of tropical rainforests in Hawaii, including around his own home where he has cultivated more than 700 endangered species of indigenous plants, including the hyophorbe indica, a palm tree he helped save from extinction.

Source: CBD website

Montreal, 30 June 2010 – At their annual summit, held on 25-26 June in Muskoka, Canada, leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) have again emphasized the critical importance of biodiversity to human well-being, sustainable development and poverty eradication, and highlighted the serious threat posed by the current rate of biodiversity loss.
Regretting that the international community is not on track to meeting its 2010 target to significantly reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity, G8 leaders underlined the importance of adopting an ambitious and achievable post-2010 framework.
In the G8 Muskoka Declaration, Recovery and New Beginning, leaders noted that: “In 2010, the UN International Year of Biodiversity, we regret that the international community is not on track to meeting its 2010 target to significantly reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity globally. We recognize that the current rate of loss is a serious threat, since biologically diverse and resilient ecosystems are critical to human well being, sustainable development and poverty eradication. We underline our support for Japan as it prepares to host the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity this October and in particular we underline the importance of adopting an ambitious and achievable post-2010 framework. We recognize the need to strengthen the science-policy interface in this area, and in this regard we welcome the agreement to establish an Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).”
On 22 September 2010, leaders of the Member States of the United Nations will convene in New York in a special high-level meeting on biodiversity being held prior to the opening of the general debate of the sixty-fifth session of the UN General Assembly. The tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10) will be held from 18 to 29 October 2010 in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. The two meetings provide opportunity for the international community to renew and strengthen commitment to halt the loss of biodiversity.
The Conference of the Parties is expected to adopt a new Strategic Plan for the Convention for 2011-2020 that sets a suite of SMART targets – goals that are at once strategic, measureable, ambitious yet realistic and time-bound – that address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss in a way that will permit national implementation within a global framework.
“Beginning with the 2007 Heiligendamm Summit, and continuing with the G8 meetings in Toyako in 2008 and L’Aquila in 2009, biodiversity issues have been a part of the G8 agenda. It was therefore fitting that the G8 leaders met in the host country of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity to address this vital issue at their 2010 meeting, in a year that coincides with the celebration of the International Year of Biodiversity,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

25 May, 2010

The climax of last week’s Settimana della Biodiversità in Rome, organized by Bioversity International, was a Call for Action from the Rome-based food agencies and other partners. On Saturday May 22nd 2010, International Day of Biodiversity, they called on the world to invest in smallholder farmers, rural communities, women and young people,all of whom have responsibilities for the conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity to fight malnutrition, build a more sustainable agriculture and improve incomes.

First to speak at the Call for Action, which was introduced by Emile Frison, Director-General of Bioversity, was Kanayo Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

“I’ve been described at the world’s largest shouter for the poor. Tonight I am prepared to shout again,” said Nwanze.

The Call for Action asked for the opening of the political and financial avenues along which these custodians must be granted passage to conserve and advance biodiversity.

Emile Frison, the Director-General of Bioversity International, underscored the importance of diversity in agriculture. Efforts to increase production have so far been based on simplified systems that depend on a few varieties of even fewer crops, which require large amounts of energy-dependent inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides. These simplified systems are both vulnerable to shocks and are unsustainable.

“This leads me to the conclusion that we must change paradigm and invest in intensification without simplification,” said Frison. He called on governments and funding organizations to invest in research and development for agriculture, based on this new paradigm.

Amir Abdullah, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the World Food Programme (WFP), addressed WFP’s work with chronically hungry people. “One of the causes of malnutrition is the lack of biodiversity. We recognize every day the impact that lack of biodiversity has on the people we work with. For that bottom billion, it’s a matter of life and death.”

Parviz Koohafkan, Director of the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), reiterated the need for political will and government collaboration. “Policies need to be set in place to help the farmers, who are the custodians of biodiversity. They must be able to maintain, perpetuate and get income from [biodiversity].”

Shakeel Bhatti, Executive Secretary of the International Treat on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) spoke about projects being supported by the Treaty’s Benefit Sharing Fund, which started in 2009. He pointed out that Italy had recently announced $US1.2 million towards the Fund to support small farmers and agricultural biodiversity.

The Call for Action was welcomed by respondents from partner organizations, including Guy Kastler of Via Campesina. He stressed the importance of farmers’ rights: “Farmers rights need to be acknowledged, or there will be no biodiversity,” said Kastler.

Note to Editors

The Call for Action was made by:

• Emile Frison, Director-General of Bioversity International,
• Parviz Koohafkan, Director of the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
• Amir Abdullah, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the World Food Programme (WFP),
• Kanayo Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD),
• Shakeel Bhatti, Executive Secretary of the International Treat on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)

With comments from:

• Mark Holderness, Executive Secretary, Global Forum on Agricultural Research,
• Ibrahim Hamdan, the Association of Agricultural Research Institutions in the Near East and North Africa (AARINENA),
• Professor M.S. Swaminathan, Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) and President of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation,
• Guy Kastler, Via Campesina and Reseaux Semences Paysannes,
• Roberto Ridolfi, European Commission,
• Melissa Wood, Global Crop Diversity Trust.