Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Training Opportunity

Via the RMAP blog, news of internships with the International Development Research Centre in Canada. The announcement at the IDRC web site gives all the details, and while some of the topics genuinely have nothing to do with agricultural biodiversity, others could definitely do with an injection of agrobiodiversity. Urban Poverty and Environment, for example, and Rural Poverty and Environment could both incorporate a diversity angle, as could Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health, I suspect.

Closing date is 12 September 2008.

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Putting words in the minister’s mouth

ACCORDING to the Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives, Mr Stephen Wasira, more than 90 per cent of farmers in the country use recycled seeds, which invariably have very low production.

I wonder where he got the idea that farm-saved seed is “invariably” low yielding?

Mr Wasira said this last week, when he was opening a workshop on the seed industry development in Tanzania.

‘Nuff said.

Read the whole report in Daily News Online.

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Tangled Bank 112

There was a bit of a mix up over the blog carnival Tangled Bank, which was supposed to appear last week, while its organizer was swanning around the Galapagos, presumably with other things on his mind. Well it is up now, with a couple of treats. One, alas, is broken. Tangled Banks says that “insects have been selecting hotter hot peppers for some time now. Andrew Bernardin at the Evolving Mind blog points out that “Mexican Food was Not Intelligently Designed.” Alas, Andrew’s blog at Evolving Mind seems to be a bit broken. And it is neat; the heat in chillies protects them from a fungus that destroys the seeds, but is ignored by birds, who disperse the seeds. My question: do birds detect chilli heat, but fail to be put off by it? Or are they completely oblivious to its presence? I mean, could you teach a bird to distinguish seed with chilli from seed without chilli?

The other treat is GrrlScientist, who takes that gray horse paper we blogged a while ago and really goes to town on it, complete with photos, graphs, and movie allusions.