- George Orwell scythes nettles, then seeks uses.
- World’s rivers in trouble. Also other wetlands the world over. CWRs to be affected, along with everything else?
- Let’s not get too hung up about rarity.
- UNESCO launches World Digital Library. Gotta be some agrobiodiversity in there somewhere, surely. Yes indeedy.
- Afghanistan’s first national park has some livestock wild relatives!
- Circum-Baltic collaboration on genetic resources conservation.
- Mongabay.com publishes lots of cool pictures of biodiversity to celebrate Earth Day yesterday. So does The Big Picture, even some vaguely farming ones. And Adam Forbes has just loaded a bunch of photos too. Luigi comments: Why didn’t we do the same for agrobiodiversity?
- Tuberculosis and domestication. Not.
“Food prices: What goes up must come down”
Oh yeah? I’ve taken our headline directly from Mariann Fischer Boel in full rhetorical flight.
When the price on wheat went up last year, I wondered quite publicly why bread prices skyrocketed when the share of wheat in the cost of producing bread was relatively low. Back then, I was told by industry that the share of agricultural raw material was in fact much higher and that rising energy prices also had an impact. Now with wheat and energy prices having dropped dramatically during the last year, I think it is legitimate to wonder again and ask: why aren’t bread prices following suit?
Good question? Or naive political drivel? You be the judge.
First cow
What with all the brouhaha over not merely the First Organic Garden but also the First Dog, our chums over at InfoFarm have turned their far-sighted historical eyes on other, more productive, animals that have graced the White House lawns. I have just one piece of advice for Michelle; sheep once destroyed a couple of years worth of pea-breeding for me, and even a small herd of beeves is hard to fence out of a garden.
GRAIN on IRRI
I suppose GRAIN’s video slideshow on IRRI and its genebank was meant as a bit of a takedown. 1 But actually it works very well as a plea for comprehensive, complementary genetic resources management strategies, encompassing both ex situ and in situ, genebanks and farmers, conservation and use. And as such I choose to approach it.
Nibbles: Japan, Bananas, GMO, Bees, Squirrels, Mangroves, Climate change and indigenous people, Goji, Svalbard, Heirloom rice, Dataporn
- Japan’s unemployed end up farming.
- Somewhat uninformed comments about the perfection of the banana.
- “…traditional genetic crosses outperform genetically modified crops by a wide margin.”
- Alice Waters takedown.
- Brits throw money at bees.
- Red squirrel missing link found through DNA fingerprinting. Red squirrel pie, anyone? Ok ok, make it grey.
- Mexican mangroves in trouble.
- “Indigenous Peoples have contributed the least to the global problem of climate change but will almost certainly bear the greatest brunt of its impact.”
- Go go goji.
- Secretary General of the Nordic Council of Ministers and former Icelandic Prime Minister waxes lyrical about genebanks.
- So there’s a Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. No, not Golden Rice. Via.
- Help the Biodiversity Heritage Library decide on a citation format. Or not. whatever.