Nibbles: Chilli, Extension, Africa, Genebank, Potatoes, War, Angora

Cool new use for hot peppers: fungicides, for agriculture and human health.
Community Knowledge Workers transformed into “Mobile Banana Disease Monitors”.
Grain “call[s] on African peasants to resist and protect their agriculture, as they have always done”.
Near Corvallis, Ore, USA? Wanna tour the genebank? Wanna write it up for us?
New World Catalogue of Potato Varieties. A pedant asks: “Any Old World varieties in there?”
Germany is said to be demanding entire Rumanian wheat crop, also part of what is left over from 1938 crop. Orwell’s approaching war.
Saving the Angora goat in the US.

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.