Nibbles: Weird veggies, National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, Indian litchis, Colony Collapse Disorder

Funky vegetables from around the world.
Ft Collins genebank on CNN.
India gets a litchi genebank. None of that in Ft Collins.
Honeybees get help from museum collections.

One Reply to “Nibbles: Weird veggies, National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, Indian litchis, Colony Collapse Disorder”

Funky vegetables. The list includes `tiger nut’ (Cyperus esculentus). We had stopped by the roadside in southern Niger and I was commiserating with a lady farmer on the vast quantity of the terrible weed, nut grass in her field. She looked at me as if I was daft (right, too). It was her field of an excellent crop of tiger nut, which to me – a highly trained crop botanist – looked exactly like nut grass (Cyperus tuberosus), a major plague in my garden in India.

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Fresh Nibbles

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.

Published on November 7, 2024