Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
It was almost exactly 10 years ago that the whole Pavlovsk thing blew up. Time does fly. For our younger readers, that’s the Vavilov Institute’s (VIR) Pavlovsk Experimental Station, where important collections of fruits and berries are conserved in rather beautiful field genebanks. For a couple of years, these were under threat, as the land …
Gates just gave AGRA $56 million to make new seed varieties available. PASS still not collecting the diversity it hopes to displace. Hang on though. Africa needs a “Green renaissance, not revolution”. Saving seeds the ancient Egyptian way. Eating sweets the ancient Papuan (and others) way. Odd to hear an agrobiodiversity dude talking about silver …
I don’t understand what is happening. That’s VIR’s Director General Nikolay Dzuybenko commenting on the Pavlovsk situation just a few days ago. I have to say I know how he feels. Anyway, keep up to date with all things VIR, including the Pavlovsk saga, on their website.
VIR’s Pavlovsk Research Station, a set on Flickr. Still all to play for at Pavlovsk.
Some of the accessions investigated by the project are nutritionally much more valuable than others. Thanks to the project, we know which berries they are. Thanks to Pavlovsk, we have the berries. On that basis alone, surely they’re more valuable than the land they occupy on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Let’s hope that the …