Luigi Guarino

January 28, 2009January 28, 2009

Online platform comes up short on agrobiodiversity

Via LEISA’s Farm comes news of INFONET-BioVision,

…an online information platform tailored to the rural population in East Africa. It offers information on sustainable agriculture and ecological control of plant-, human- and animal- targeting pests and disease vectors.

Leave aside for a moment the unlikelihood of many rural people in East Africa being able to access such a platform. ¹ It does have a great deal of useful information on the agronomy of a large number of crops, including neglected ones, focusing on pest and disease control strategies. But there’s not as much as one might have hoped on the value of diversity. Although, for example, there’s a list of a few local and improved cultivars in the cassava section, I didn’t get the sense of genetic diversity management as a legitimate strategy for sustainability. On a par with “conservation tillage,” say. Pity.

January 27, 2009January 28, 2009

Professor screws up on domestication?

Iâ€™m having a domestication research moment today, after reading an interview full of inaccuracies by a renowned professor (I wonâ€™t name names). After spotting two major screw ups in his logic and several outright wrong â€˜factsâ€™, Iâ€™ve decided to be more thorough and start digging into West African yam domestication and the process that leads to it.

Oh name names, Mathilda, please!

Incidentally, there’s lots of agrobiodiversity stuff, including on domestication and crop wild relatives, at the open-access journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications. Just found out about it at Cultural Landscapes.

January 27, 2009

Heirloom tomatoes in the news…a lot

Stuck at home in bed over the past few days I’ve amused myself by looking at trends in the volume of googling for “seed bank” and “Svalbard” and of news items about armyworm outbreaks.

Anyway, here’s another one. It seems that there has been a steady increase over the past few years in news stories about heirloom tomatoes.

News peaks in summer, not surprisingly. Interestingly, the search pattern, which is not as clear-cut as that for news shown above, does not coincide with that for “seed banks.”

Well, all this is great fun, of course, but does it have any practical use? I mean along the lines of the recently-announced flu early warning system. Problem is, plant diseases don’t really generate the levels of interest of things like flu. Except maybe Ug99. So what is it good for, agrobiodiversity-wise? Apart from playing around when one is ill, that is.

January 27, 2009January 27, 2009

Nibbles: Cotton, Citrus, Fig, Permaculture, Turtles, Wine, Cacao, Fish

Wild cotton use lands prize for boffin trio.
Unesco to protect wild Citrus in India. And read the discussion.
IV International Symposium on Fig.
Permaculture: The Podcast.
The NY Times thinks Americans should eat fewer turtles. And drink more South African wine.
Meanwile, the WSJ gets into single-source chocolate.
Nice map of freshwater fish diversity. But will it last? WWF has a plan.

January 26, 2009January 26, 2009

Youth being recalcitrant about veggies

The Journal of the American Dietetic Association has a paper ² which goes all meta on projects which aimed to encourage kids to eat more fruit and vegetables by getting them to work in gardens, for example at school. It covers the period 1990-2007, but only US-based studies, alas. I’m trying to get hold of the paper, but from the abstract it seems that the best that can be said about such interventions is that they may have a nutrition impact. We have blogged about how people are using school gardens etc. to educate yoofs about the importance of agrobiodiversity: it’s kind of sad to see that it is not entirely clear if the message is getting through.