Brainfood: Barley landrace evaluation, Aceh cattle, Zizania diversity, French apple cores, Vanuatu food security, Tomato genomics, Cacao fermentation, Wild foods, Activist anthropologists, Ancient wheats

One Reply to “Brainfood: Barley landrace evaluation, Aceh cattle, Zizania diversity, French apple cores, Vanuatu food security, Tomato genomics, Cacao fermentation, Wild foods, Activist anthropologists, Ancient wheats”

  1. Free seeds and food sovereignty: This is well worth reading. However, it says: “but local knowledge and crop biodiversity increasingly disappear as farmers take on debt or enter the market and abandon traditional subsistence”. This is certainly true of the target of the paper – the US South. But it ignores a major cause of loss of crop genetic resources worldwide – the undercutting of local markets and subsistence farmers in many developing countries by the dumping of crop exports from North America (including PL 480 food aid) and – increasingly – South America. This seems to be the `elephant in the room’ that everybody ignores. Just what is the impact of the vast flow of soybean westwards from the Americas to East Asia on local producers in the region of diversity of soybean? Just what does the promotion of Canadian noodle wheat exports have on Asian wheat farmers? And lots more besides. I can’t find any economic/genetic resources account of the damage already done and probable in the future.

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