- Rebuilding Haiti’s agriculture on the back of diverse tissue-cultured banana plantlets.
- Rhizowen’s hidden talets. And no, that’s not a misprint.
- “The age long drink, also known as BKT, serves as a source of alcohol for those who lack the financial means to patronise refined brew like beer and other foreign or imported drinks.” Count me in.
- Citrus diversity — is the genetic blueprint the only way to enjoy it?
- The collapse of wild-caught fish. In brief.
UK to spend GBP15 million on food security
The UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRSC: does that name give you any clues about their priorities?) has committed GBP15 million “to establish training for food security research and development”. So, what’s involved?
- “Transferring the UK’s world-leading bioscience research from the lab bench to the field will underpin this fast-growing sector.”
- “The AgriSkills Forum recognises the need to address skills in the agri-food sector in a holistic manner and we look forward to working closely with BBSRC to compare notes and ensure that any potential synergies are encouraged to be realised.”
- “Farming remains at the heart of tackling the challenge of feeding a world of nine billion people by 2050. What the farming industry needs in order to meet this challenge is strong agricultural and horticultural research in the UK. … This BBSRC scheme will help to ensure that research done by highly skilled scientists can benefit farmers by being translated into new technologies, practices and advice they can use on a commercial scale to produce more and impact less.”
- “We need an increased number of individuals with specific very high level skills if we are to meet the challenge of future food security that has been laid out for us.”
I wonder what they’ll come up with for people who eat food. h/t Charles Spillane.
Featured: China
Rhizowen summarizes what China’s farmers are doing to their soil:
Farmers of Forty Centuries blow it in a few decades. They’ll be needing a lot more land – somewhere else and soon. Any spare continents going?
Witnesses to agricultural adaptation
I think we may have already blogged about WWF’s Climate Witness programme, and if not we should have. It’s a very “effective way to illustrate the impacts of climate change on real people in many different locations around the world, and the action they are taking to address the issues.” Several of the stories involve agriculture, of course. For example, Joseph Kones from Bomet in Kenya says that drought has been increasing in his area over the past 20 years, and that his farm is part of a pilot adaptation project involving tree planting and the building of terraces. It would be nice to extract all the agrobiodiversity-relevant examples of changes and adaptation to them. Perhaps a job for the Platform on Agrobiodiversity Research? Which incidentally we have just added to our blogroll. See what I did there?
Competition for Svalbard?
A world class seed vault has been established on the Siachen Glacier to preserve India’s biological wealth for future generations, Dr. Ajay Parida, Executive Director, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation confirmed on Saturday.
The vault, which has a natural temperature between -20 and -40 celsius, will hold samples of rice, pulses, peas and beans and can be used for building food programmes across the nation.
This was at a meeting in which the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Lars Peder Brekk also participated. I wonder if Mr Brekk mentioned the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.