Nibbles: Mopani, Svalbard, Chestnut blight, West African eats, Megareport, Fungi, Smallanthus, Innovation, MSB video, Pacific bananas

No more mopani worms in Zimbabwe. Luigi distraught.
More tosh on Svalbard. Nobody distraught.
Chestnut blight threatens UK chestnuts. Castanophiles distraught.
The oily charms of West African cuisine. Did someone say “oily”?
Another big panel of the great and the good has issued a deafening report; Gordon Conway, panellist, tells us “How to create resilient agriculture“.
DFID fertilises Vietnamese mushroom farms. Kept in the dark and fed manure?
Yacon spotted in Malaysia. Just ask for snow lotus fruit.
The World Bank has published a Sourcebook on Agricultural Innovation. So can we all go home now?
Step inside the Millennium Seed Bank. A video.
ProMusa disentangles Pacific bananas, the better to conserve them.

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.