- The date palm has a red weevil problem, but FAO is on it.
- Refried beans.
- Sarada Krishnan on her life in coffee. If there’s good news for the crop, it’s partly because of her.
- Mangalitsa in Rome. Jeremy reports.
- ICBA joins the international genebank club. FAO is on it.
Coffea: Luigi – A good article on Sarada Krishnan. However, this took me to a couple of other coffee articles from the Crop Trust, mentioning the World Coffee Research (WCR) system. This is a coffee industry-funded body based in the USA. This location goes against all my experience of 23 years in tropical agriculture in tropical countries (including a short time managing the CATIE coffee collection). I also worked for three years in UWI on Trinidad, the location of the Cocoa Research Centre of the University of the West Indies (UWI). This experience indicates that research institutes for tropical crops should be in tropical countries (on the model of the CGIAR tropical crops institutes). There is therefore no reason whatever that the WCR should not be based somewhere sensible and tropical such as CATIE (an inter-American research institute) which has a world-class Coffea collection – including Robusta, which the WCR seems to ignore in a form of coffee snobbery.
Any industry funding could go directly to CATIE – which also has other vast living collections of global importance (for example, cacao and its wild relatives, certainly meriting World Cocoa Foundation funding).