Nibbles: Tea nomenclature, Medicinal plants, Robert Fortune, Gender gap, Japanese women farmers, AnGR conservation, Herbarium databases, India & Africa

Tea diversity 101.
Tea is medicinal, isn’t it? Certainly some other plants introduced to the West by the same person are.
I could tell you all about the gender gap in tea cultivation in Kenya.
And I bet there’s one in Japan too.
Not to mention in livestock-keeping. But I don’t suppose that will affect (ILRI’s) plans for a ~~Kenyan~~ livestock genebank.
Crowdsourcing herbarium data. Maybe there’s some specimens of wild tea species in there…
India reaches out to Africa. ICRISAT involved. Debal Deb, probably not so much. Chai, anyone?

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.