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419 - When mangroves no longer protect the coastline
December 2012
The mangroves of Guyana, in South America, are gradually disappearing. Contrary to the coastline of its near neighbour, French Guiana, which is still relatively protected, that of Guyana has been largely developed. In order to develop agriculture and aquaculture, earth dikes were built, destroying the greater part of the mangrove forest.
A study( 1) conducted by IRD researchers and the University of Aix-Marseille shows that the reduced protection provided by mangroves against the swell will lead to the large-scale erosion of 370 km of the country's coastline. Only one ecosystem restoration programme will help contain this phenomenon.
402 - Exiled ‘brains’ under-employed
April 2012
Who are the Latino-American migrants? What do they do in their host country? The new MICAL observatory( 1), led by IRD researchers, enables the day-to-day study of the movements of this diaspora across the world. Thanks to this data, sociologists are able to describe the massive exile of ‘brains’ that took place in the first half of the 2000s in Latin America. Between 2000 and 2006, the number of expatriate graduates doubled, and today has reached over 3 million. It’s a loss that may be damaging in the country of origin, but can also represent a generalised loss of knowledge: these exiles very often end up under-employed. The percentage of engineers, researchers and other high grades working at an under-qualified level has greatly increased as a result. This was the case in 2006, for example, for three quarters of Bolivian and Ecuadorian migrants
Today the crisis that is currently affecting Spain is modifying or even inverting the migratory trends. A return to the new Latin-American eldorados is increasingly being observed. The consequences of this on the graduates' situation should be monitored closely.
394 - Malaria: how did it reach the Americas?
January 2012
The malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum , originates from Africa, and is found on every continent. Over 200 million people are infected every year from Africa to Asia, as well as in America and the Middle East. How did it spread to the entire planet? It is not entirely clear how it conquered the New World. Scientists from the UMR Migevec ( 1) and their partners ( 2) have recently shown in the journal PNAS that the pathogen was introduced by ship during the slave trade. The research team collected samples of infected blood taken across the whole distribution area of the disease. Analysis of genetic material extracted showed that the American P. falciparum is a close cousin of its African counterpart. In addition, two separate genetic groups exist in Latin America, as a result of two distinct slave routes, one towards the Spanish empire in the North – West Indies and present-day Mexico and Colombia – and the other towards the Portuguese empire – today’s Brazil. Nearly half of the 2.7 million annual cases of malaria in America are now occurring in Brazil.
This recent expansion of the disease shows the parasite’s ability to spread.
382 - The scars of slavery
September 2011
The diaspora of Afro-descendants in Mexico and Central America takes on many guises, as reflected in names used such as Colonial Blacks, Afro-Antilleans, Garifuna. Status and levels of social recognition and integration are highly diverse and this distinguishes the countries of this region from the rest of the Latin-American continent. Researchers from the IRD and their partners( 1) involved in the programmes AFRODESC and EURESCL( 2) are studying the historical construction of these communities, which developed from successive waves of migrations, and of their identities.
Three hundred years of slavery, from the 16th to 19th Centuries, have left their scars. After abolition, there was exclusion, which drove descendants of slaves to migrate to the major centres of employment around the Caribbean rim. Now they represent a second diaspora and experience persisting inequality and stigmatization. Unlike Brazil and Colombia, symbols of multiculturalism, the “Black question” in Mexico and Central America has not attracted the strong interest of politicians and researchers.
347 - A new history of coffee
April 2010
Coffee now represents the primary source of wealth of many tropical countries. Only two species are cultivated, which produce the renowned Arabica and Robusta. However, a total of nearly 120 wild Coffea species exist which, starting from their origin in Lower Guinea, colonized the whole of Equatorial Africa and the Madagascar region in 400 000 years. That has been found by a recent study by IRD researchers and their Brazilian partner 1, using DNA sequencing of 26 species. Up to now, owing to the presence of coffee bushes in Africa, Madagascar and India, botanists thought that they originated from the Horn of Africa, before the Gondwana supercontinent broke up, more than 100 million years B. P. These investigations prompt a reorientation of research onto the coffee genome, with a view to improving this plant so highly important in agronomic and socio-economic terms.
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