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FAO FOCUS: PARTNERSHIP PROGRAMMES |
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TCDC/TCCT |
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Interview with palm specialist Rodrigo Bernal
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Rodrigo Bernal at FAO Headquarters after his mission |
What was the purpose of your trip?
The purpose of the assignment was to discuss a proposal to establish a Global Centre for Coordination of Research on Palm-Livestock systems. That was the original idea, but the idea has since been evolving, and now, as a result of my trip, it has a very different shape. Now the idea is not for a global centre, but a network. And it's not only for palms and livestock systems, but a network for palms in general. Now it's called the Global Palm Research Network, and it will exist only through the Internet. The network will link scientists doing research on all aspects of all species of the palm family. So it's a very broad scope, but it couldn't be any different. As it was initially conceived - including only systems that integrate livestock and palms - it would be very difficult to define the boundaries. Where do you draw the boundaries between livestock systems that integrate palms and systems that integrate palms and agroforestry, for instance?
Can you give me some examples of such systems?
A system integrating livestock and palms is the use of toddy to feed pigs, for example, or cattle integrated with coconut plantations. But then coconut plantations are also intercropped with other plants - with cocoa, with cinnamon and many other plants. But also, agroforestry systems in the tropics sometimes use wild resources and not only cultivated crops. So they all are a continuum. The network as currently defined will be a broad one, but the way we are going to manage the information makes it easy to retrieve exactly the information you want. If you are a scientist working only on palm anatomy and you have nothing to do with pigs, you never search for pigs in the database.
Who is going to manage the network?
We have a number of partners, all those institutions that I visited, plus many others that we will contact. All the institutions will be partners at the same level - a very horizontal relationship. For each type of information - research, events, ongoing projects, etc. - there will be a database. Each database will have an editor - a scientist who volunteers to check the incoming information, make sure there are no errors in it and then load the database with that information. The editors - 12 in all - will make up an editorial committee. This is the idea today, but it could change. As it is designed it doesn't seem to generate much cost, because the editors are volunteering, there is no office and no secretary. So as we see it - maybe we are wrong - the only costs involved would be for the individual institutions to have a connection to the Internet. Most of them already have it, but let's say they have to pay for that particular session.
Are you modelling the network on others that already exist?
Yes. I have gone into many networks on the Internet to see what other people are doing, and I have had discussions with people from WAICENT (FAO's World Agricultural Information Centre), who have given us a lot of ideas. So we are not trying to reinvent the wheel.
So, how did your trip go?
Smoothly. It went very well. I had very interesting discussions with people from many institutions - about 25 in all. Everyone gave very interesting input. I explained the idea to them, but only as an idea because we want it to be created by all of us. We didn't want to go to them with an idea that was already developed. In general people were very supportive and very positive, but the conditions vary from country to country, particularly in the availability of the Internet and their computer resources.
How important are palms to the countries you visited?
Palms as a group are the second most important type of plant for tropical countries, after grasses. On a world level, they are third, after grasses and legumes. For aboriginal cultures, palms are basic to their way of life in some tropical areas. And a few species of palms have become major crops, like the coconut, the oil palm and the date palm. In Southeast Asia, rattans are one of the important non-timber forest products. And many species of palms, besides these four groups that I have just mentioned, have an enormous potential that is still not developed. There are many wild species that are still only used at a local level, at a domestic level, but their oil content or their nutritional potential is huge. One wild species, for example, provides as much oil as the African oil palm provided when it was first domesticated. So they could easily be domesticated in the same way. Tropical countries have not paid much attention to this.
So it's important that these wild species aren't forgotten and replaced by other domesticated species?
Yes, they could be replaced and they could be lost. The one I've just mentioned that produces the same amount of oil as the African oil palm grows wild in Ecuador and Colombia. It's called Attalea colenda. The word "colenda" literally means "that must be cultivated". So when the first botanist gave it a Latin name, he was already aware that this plant should be cultivated, and this was 50 years ago. He saw local people using it for the oil. In Colombia they have cut down all the trees of this species. It's literally extinct there now and has been replaced with African oil palm. It's the most ridiculous thing you can imagine. Of course, oil palm produces more than the Attalea colenda because it's already been domesticated and it's planted in extensive crops, but they have destroyed the local variety without ever having tried to do something with it. This is just one example, but there are many other species with huge potential that have been lost.
Will the new network encourage people to look to wild species by spreading this kind of information?
Yes it will, by serving as a round table for all of us to share information on what we do, what we think we should giving more priority to. In this way, I think many topics that today go unnoticed could be called to the attention of researchers. Sometimes people are interested in doing something with these wild species, but sometimes they don't even know that these species exist. For example, as botanists, we often have people asking us, "What species could be used for this or that?" or "Do you know a species that is used for this purpose?" So people from applied sciences are always looking for new things to use, new species to cultivate. But the knowledge is in the hands of the botanists, and we seem to live in different worlds. The network would provide a very good opportunity for all of us to share information more easily, to become more multidisciplinary.
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