Month: July 2010

July 30, 2010August 7, 2010

Feeding you the Pavlovsk feed

Our ever-attentive reader will have noticed today’s Nibble on the TweetMedvedev campaign. It refers to an effort to save the priceless collection of fruits and berries at the Vavilov Institute’s Pavlovsk Station, just outside St Petersburg. Do please tweet President Medvedev, as suggested by Cary Fowler in his latest Huffington Post piece. To further highlight this important initiative, we are also bringing you a feed of a search on Twitter for the #Pavlovsk hashtag. Just scroll down the right sidebar past the featured comment box. We’re here to serve.

Tweet this: @KremlinRussia_E Mr. President, protect the future of food – save #Pavlovsk Station! http://huff.to/pavlsk

July 30, 2010July 30, 2010

Nibbles: CGIAR “change”, Cuba, Data, Pavlovsk, Homegardens, Soil bacteria, Thai rice

GFAR publishes list of Megaprogramme (or whatever they are called) consultations.
Cuba’s Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate Rolando Macias Cardenas reports on tomato paste. In other news, Cuba has a Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate. No, wait, that’s not really news.
While Sachs et al. moan about better agricultural data, CIAT go out and get it.
The Pavlovsk TweetMedvedev campaign rolls on.
“…maximum diversity can be conserved at an intermediate level of income” in Javanese bamboo-tree homegardens.
Right, so trees “farm” bacteria. What some people will write in a press release.
Thailand’s rice farmers trying to cope with climate change. Like they have a choice.

July 29, 2010July 28, 2010

Featured: Bitterness and toxicity in food

After a rich commentary on a recent post on how farmers detoxify cassava, Pablo seems to be about to throw up his hands in despair, but steps back from the brink:

I begin to think that ignoring examples such as these, with lessons and clear examples that are rigorously scientific and practical is not about lack of evidence or oversight, but a policy to eliminate smallholder agriculture and the knowledge it holds. This would remove any viable alternative to the agro-industrial hegemony over our food and our diverse agrarian landscapes. I hope my fears are misplaced.

July 29, 2010July 31, 2010

Can Science Feed the World?

That’s the question posed by the title of a big splash in Nature. The answer, in case you don’t want to work your way through the various contributions, as summarized in a handy pamphlet, is yes, by enabling sustainable intensification, although not on its own. So nothing wildly new there. Also not new is that once again agrobiodiversity gets the shaft. One of the articles does focus on plant breeding, but it doesn’t mention the need to ensure the long-term availability of its raw material — crop and livestock genetic diversity, including that in genebanks. There’s also a piece by Jeffrey Sachs and numerous co-authors on the need for better global monitoring of agriculture, which doesn’t mention the desirability of monitoring levels of agricultural biodiversity on-farm. Oh well.

July 29, 2010July 29, 2010

Nibbles: Vancouver Island, Organic breeding, Evolution, Roots, Coffee, ABS, Donkey domestication, Domestication, Yam

Nancy Turner, great food anthropologist, deconstructs dinner on air.
Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? Eucarpia conference in Paris in December. Love the ?
Ford Denison on evolution in reverse: crops that become weeds.
Nature on evolution in forward: crop breeders look at roots.
“Shade-coffee farms support native bees that maintain genetic diversity in tropical forests.” Good to know.
Want to know about Access & Benefit Sharing negotiations? We thought so.
Ancient people moved their asses.
Selection during domestication differs from selection during diversification. For the ass too?
Expect to see Dioscorea hispida appear in spam emails very soon.
And today’s answer to malnutrition is a blue-grin alga from Lake Chad. Kidding apart, it’s an interesting story.