Nibbles: Food security, CWR, Rice, Food crisis, Yams, Peanuts, Tuscan wine, SADC seeds, Lonely trees

Handy primer on the effects of climate change and biodiversity on food security, courtesy of the House of Lords.
Crop wild relatives could help with all three.
Trouble brewing for rice. House of Lords nodding wisely.
The trouble that brewed for wheat wasn’t quite as advertised. Spoiler alert: the price spike had to do with China buying up all it could. So is rice next then?
No trouble brewing for yams now that they’re getting sequenced.
Nor for peanuts in the Gambia, for different reasons.
Sounds like everything is hunky dory for the Tuscan grape too.
Good to see SADC is on the job.
It may be too late for some trees though.

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.