- Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher optimistic that farmers can avoid becoming “serfs of a different kind”.
- Three chicory museums? Who knew? Want to know more about chicory?
- Just when you thought it was safe, Return of the Pocket Pigs (with added photographic goodness).
Seed savers take matters into their own hands
In this global world it can be valuable to stop and think for a moment that we share the same problems and solutions. Traditional knowledge and informal seed systems are not the preserve of “resource-poor farmers in marginal areas in developing countries”. They can be just as vital to fatcat hobby gardeners in the richest countries on earth. Seed swaps, where people exchange their seeds and their knowledge, are now common features of garden life around the developed world, and increasing in frequency and importance as gardeners come to value biodiversity.
All of which is prompted by this fine account of a recent Seedy Saturday from Ottawa Hortiphilia. Check it out, and if anyone else has a report on a seed swap, from Mali, Montreal or Morecombe, let us know.
Nibbles: Anti-diversification, chickens, bananas, registers, tropical fruits
- US subsidy system prevents diversification. Via.
- Chicken domestication; possibly more than you could ever want to know.
- Red bananas; Raul unavailable for comment.
- Filipino community registers agrobiodiversity.
- Tropical fruit diversity conserved, studied and consumed in the US. That includes the citron. 1
Nibbles: Peas, corn, marama, peaches, bees
- Follow along with the adventures of an amateur pea breeder. Mendel comments: “go for it, girl”.
- And the corn (maize) genome is announced, apparently with recipes. Via.
- Namibians domesticate nutritious wild legume. Mendel comments: “what’s wrong with peas?”
- New Zealand (re)discovers square peaches. Mendel unavailable on this one.
- Honeybee evolution summarized.
Party Poopers: GRAIN on Svalbard
However, this “ultimate safety net” for the biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant — indeed, only — approach to crop diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers’ fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international ex situ system.
Now tell me, honestly, how on Earth could anyone have seen that coming. From GRAIN, of all people.