Nibbles: Salty aroids, Bring back bele, Polyploidy, Land Institute, SEB2013, Wheat blog, Agrikalsa Niu

Palau finds salt-tolerant taros.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, researchers try to revive bele. That would be aibika. Or slippery kabis. Or Abelmoschus manihot.
Which is a polyploid, isn’t it? Not to mention perennial.
Bound to be lots of Pacific stuff at the Society for Economic Botany’s meeting, going on NOW. No, wait, it’s ending today. Bummer.
Did you know that the first formal plant disease record in the Pacific region was from wheat, grown in Sydney by the first colonists? Well, I’m not entirely sure if that’s true, but it’s a way of introducing this blog on wheat in this Pacifically-themed Nibbles.
Agrikalsa Nius is the monthly electronic newsletter of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of the Solomon Islands.

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.