William Dar leads. ICRISAT leads the way

INDIA - 2010 is the Chinese Year of the Tiger. It might as well be, as the tiger is one of the endangered species; it was declared so in 1969 yet or 41 years ago (theinsite.org). The year's name goes well with the UN declaration of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity - a global call to prevent the irrevocable loss of the world's plant and animal species either due to natural disasters or human activities, legal and not. That means, ideally, that the vegetation and wildlife we see today can be reproduced anywhere today or in the future if necessary. The nature we experience today, our grandchildren should be able to experience in more ways than one. We owe it to them. It's called intergenerational equity. A simpler term is legacy.

Some 40% of the world's economy and 80% of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources, according to a report. In April 2002, the Convention on Biological Diversity committed itself to reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, which is this year. We will find out soon enough. The world needs biodiversity.

But then again, biodiversity is such a discouraging word I'd like to simplify it. Bio, life; diversity, variety. The word has actually been derived from biological diversity. But it is much more than just variety of life. In my article "Changing climates, US. Biodiversity is US" (19 February 2010, iNews, Earth), I define biodiversity as all life on earth. I explain it there:

My definition does not limit biodiversity to the variety of life; it goes on to imply the web, the network, the interconnectedness of all life, the complexity of all that - and yes, and more importantly, connecting to man, pointing to man ...

I'm glad to find that I wasn't whistling in the wind early this year. Based in India, Team ICRISAT, led by Director General and Team Captain William Dar (left of photo), has come up with its own wide-ranging interpretation of biodiversity:

For more than three decades, ICRISAT focused its research on five "mandate" crops, but current thinking has steered the Institute into a more holistic approach in its mission. ICRISAT's approach to the preservation of biodiversity is multi-pronged - conservation of genetic resources, diversifying the uses of its mandate crops, developing farmer-friendly pest management strategies and the employment of modern scientific tools, such as GIS, to trace progress of land erosion and degradation in order to save and protect the affected areas.

"Current thinking has steered the Institute into a more holistic approach" - that is to the credit of Dar. Holistic - everything is related to everything else. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

To conserve the genetic resources - that is, the genes contained in a germplasm such as a seed - of its mandate crops, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT maintains accessions (additions) of its collections of chickpea, peanut, pearl millet, pigeon pea and sorghum under long-term storage in the Institute's genebank. Even so, samples of the seeds are freely available for research purposes. ICRISAT also contributes duplicate samples to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

One life into another life. One other way ICRISAT conserves the variety of life is by injecting into the life stream of domestic species some desirable traits from wild species, such as resistance to late leaf spot (injected into the peanut or groundnut), resistance to the army worm (into the tobacco plant), as well as high protein content, dwarf growth habit, and resistance to insect pest (into the pigeon pea). That's the modern interpretation of "acquired traits" versus "inherited traits." Natural breeding is too slow and the pests are too fast.

"ICRISAT's work on crop diversification," says Dar, "hinges on three objectives: improving the livelihood options of the farmer, the effective use of scarce resources, and sustainability." If not the farm, the sources of income must be diversified. The costs of farming must be reduced. Farming must not only survive; it must improve the life of the farm family.

Thus, ICRISAT encourages the additional use of pearl millet, sorghum and peanut as fodder (stems and leaves) for livestock. Likewise, the Institute urges the use of grains of pearl millet and sorghum in the poultry feed and brewing industries. Added uses are added values.

"Sorghum is a super crop," says Dar. You use the grains for food; you extract the juice from the stems to make bioethanol, and you use the collection of crushed stems and leaves, called bagasse, as livestock fodder. You can also use the bagasse as organic fertilizer. In just those, sorghum beats sugarcane as a crop.

Because of its multiple uses, 3 years ago, in 2008, I already called sweet sorghum the "Sweetheart Crop" ("Grey-to-Green Revolution," American Chronicle). For one thing, American corn is food elsewhere but now is being turned into bioethanol; in contrast, sweet sorghum does not diminish the corn supply like American corn does, and yet sweet sorghum increases the bioethanol supply. Sweet sorghum does not rob Peter to pay Paul.

Aside from sorghum, ICRISAT also promotes the use of Jatropha and Pongamia as sources of biodiesel. "These crops grow well on degraded lands," Dar says. In so doing, these crops trap the moisture in the soil and thereby increase the watershed value of that degraded land. In other words, either Jatropha or Pongamia almost literally grows water where none grew before.

Aside from all that, ICRISAT promotes the cultivation of medicinal and aromatic crops. "Medicinal and aromatic crops require less water and fetch better prices for the farmers," says Dar. You bring down the cost of production, you bring up the returns. That counts towards sustain-ability. These crops are values added.

A miserly drip irrigation system, the African Market Garden, AMG, is a good example of an ICRISAT-based technology that brings down the cost of production of vegetable gardening and brings up the returns. Along with the AVRDC, now known as the World Vegetable Center, ICRISAT helps the farm families in West and Central Africa put food into people's stomachs and income into the farmers' wallets - in this case, the women's wallets first, as the ladies have been found to be the best farmers yet: Unlike the men, the women think of their family first.

In the matter of pests, ICRISAT entomologists have come up with a non-chemical pesticide against the single infamous worm of many guises and that attacks many a crop, as you can guess by the 5 names of this single insect pest (scientific name Helicoverpa armigera): cotton bollworm, tobacco budworm, corn earworm, tomato fruitworm, and gram pod borer (Discover Life & Wikipedia) - the worm refers to its larval stage. It's a moth, and it's deadly.

Against that worm, one non-toxic method that ICRISAT prescribes is simply shaking those crawling things off the plants; another is the use of the nuclear polyhedrosis virus as a bio-pesticide. I will leave the virus alone - not for jokers like me. In the first method, the Indians see to it that chickens follow the shaking of the leaves - the worms drop and they fall almost right into the open mouths of the birds. It's a chicken-and-worm situation. I like au naturale.