- Good COP, bad COP? Registration opens for Agriculture and Rural Development Day 2010, at COP16, the Climate Change COP.
- Maya in Haiti? Jamaica? Institute expands its reach.
- India considering making the right to food an actual right to food. But how?
- Science magazine shares the Pav-Love-sk.
- “From 28 August to 3 October, the Curried Sausage Field is open to visitors on Diedersdorfer Weg in Berlin. This is BfR’s second didactic plant labyrinth.” Don’t even ask.
- Bananas for juice. Power type juice.
- New book explores history, future of international agriculture. Anyone reading it?
- Hear Bioversity’s DG warn Pacific islanders of fast food health risks.
- “Without the yeast, beer would be nonalcoholic and noncarbonated.” Yeah, but then what would be the point? The Ecological Society of America considers beer — and issues a delightful apology.
- Video on saving Ankole cattle.
- Amphibians find it hard to move higher in response to climate change. And plants? Crops? Wild relatives? Has anyone done the modelling?
- The pristine Amazon. Not.
- Wild tomatoes and drought.
- The best plants for pollinators.
- When are different crops sown around the world? Gotta love meta-analyses.
- Apparently conservationists interested in the economics of it all must abandon the “straightjacket of the Walrasian core.” So now there’s no excuse.
Agriculture improves nutrition improves agriculture
[W]e know that if we can get better micronutrients and get better total nutrition into kids in particular, we know that we can save many, many, many lives, and we know that we can do that in a more cost-effective way. Similarly, we know having healthier populations can contribute to food production and improved economic outcomes that then lead to improved nutrition. So it works in both directions, and we’re committed to making that link a productive one.
That’s Rajiv Shah, head of USAID, in an article in Nature Medicine, noted and linked by our friend Jess. Only one question remains: where you going to source the micronutrients, Rajiv?
“Luckily, there was a plant pathologist in center field”
Center field, for those of you unfamiliar with baseball argot, is somewhere in the centre of the field of dreams. And for Mat Kinase, the presence of a plant pathologist there was a perfect opportunity first to understand and then to explain an astonishing event:
We were only a few pitches into the first inning and everyone’s feet were completely orange. No one could figure out why the grass had been spray painted.
Can you figure it out? And why we are reporting it here?
Nibbles: Pavlovsk, Environment, Medicinals
- New York Times blog and USA Today update readers on Pavlovsk.
- Biopolitical unpacks the environmentalists’ paradox, and finds it not in the least bit paradoxical.
- New standards promulgated to protect wild medicinal plants, and wild plant collectors. Phew.
- BioBlitz in East London. Wonder if they’ll find anything edible?
Pavlovsk complexities “simplified”
Our friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust have just provided an update on what is happening at the Pavlovsk experiment Station. But don’t go to the Trust’s website, go straight to the Trust’s super-hip Facebook page, which is where you’ll end up anyway. 1