Nibbles: Fossil biodiversity, Culture & health, Cicer drought experiment, Endangered fish, Wheat hydridization, Food aid, Ag trade double, Sustainable diets, Fermentation book

The Global Fossil Record. Visualized. Not agricultural, but couldn’t resist it.
Malnutrition? It’s the culture, stupid.
Check out the world’s largest chickpea drought trial.
Overfishing the Amazon.
Ah, so that’s how wheat did it!
Food aid can support sustainable livelihoods too.
Soon, most crop production will go to feed China’s pigs. And you’ll be able to follow that on FAOStat’s interactive thingie on agricultural tradeflows.
But it can’t possibly be good for sustainable diets, can it?
New book on fermentation. Never enough of those.

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.