Nibbles: Eyzaguirre speaks, Hunger, India in Africa, Aquaculture, Mutation breeding, Climate info, Micronutrients, Peanuts, Crops from space, CIMMYT in Africa, Cassava beer, Heirloom onion, Coffee research, Newton’s apple, Gastronomica

An anthropologists speaks about landscapes.
ILRI says: “Landscapes, I’ve got your landscapes right here.”
India makes its play for African agricultural landscapes. I hope there will be scorecards and women. And access to Indian genebank holdings…
Will there be fish though?
And will India be pushing its mutation-bred varieties in Africa? Not that there’s anything wrong with them.
Or using climate information?
Or mining technology for that matter.
Surely there will be dual-purpose groundnuts.
Doesn’t India have a satellite?
~~Meanwhile, CIMMYT is making its own African play. Maybe some of the stuff it is doing there could be useful in India too?~~ Two dead links
~~Africa could teach India some other stuff too.~~ Dead link.
Pretty sure this nearly-extinct-onion-rescued story is totally irrelevant to both India and Africa.
Unlike coffee research.
I don’t suppose I can interest anyone in a not very nice tasting, disease-prone but historical apple?
And speaking of historical connections… Well that was quite a journey.

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.