Let’s take this nice and slow …
- A history of the eggplant, and its usurpation. Is that even a word?
- The fun to be had from a few true
friendspotato seeds. - It’s out! “Lessons learned about ways and means to conserve and use genetic diversity to build resilience to climate change in food and agriculture systems survey report” (PDF)
It’s out!: But was it worth the effort. The only references (twice) to `plant breeding’ was (twice) to `participatory plant breeding’. As plant breeding – replacing quantity by quality – is certainly the best way to make food systems resilient in the face of climate change my charge is that the process was a gross waste of opportunity. And the second best way of making food systems resilient is through crop and animal introduction. The scale of farmers’ participation in this is very valuable on a regional scale (for example, right across Eurasia) but is now far better done on a trans-oceanic scale by the standard combination of CG genebanks supporting evaluation networks and plant breeding (ditto for farm animals). FAO may have lost the plot on this after the valuable work their plant introduction programme did all those years was abandoned when the Commission came along and meetings and dogma took over.