Nibbles: Swaziland, Traditional Knowledge, Climate change, Apples, Winged beans, Ambakkadan Cassava

Queen Mother Ntombi Indlovukazi of Swaziland receives the FANRPAN 2011 Food Security Policy Leadership Award. Her son’s a caution too.
Summaries of presentations at Informing International Policy on Traditional Knowledge, Mexico 2011.
CGIAR book on “climate-proofing” crops critical to food security in the developing world.
Happy Birthday to the McIntosh apple.
Rhizowen’s winged beans fail to take flight.
Sharefair hears how women farmers in India resurrected a favoured cassava.
Sharefair hears dream-team pitch on frike, or as we prefer to say, freekeh.

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.