- “Take into account both women’s and men’s preferences when developing and introducing new varieties.”
- Rats!
- Domestication of figs pre-dates that of cereals?
- Neanderthals liked barbecue.
- Underutilized plant in homegarden a terror threat.
- Heirloom bean farmer feted by Washington Post, added to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog blogroll.
- Orchards as hotspots of agrobiodiversity.
- “…grass pea is a ‘poster child’…”
Malanga comes through Ike
Cuba has not been lucky this hurricane season. The latest storm to hit is Ike. Damage to agriculture has been extensive, but there is a glimmer of good news:
In Cienfuegos, plantain and sweet potato are affected, as well as vegetables and citrus such as grapefruit and orange. The one crop that hasn’t been affected is malanga – a tuber kind of like potato.
Malanga is Xanthosoma, and Cuban researchers have had a great interest in the crop.
As Grahame Jackson says in his Xanthosoma Yahoo Group post, “diversity of local food crops is so important in countries where there are threats from natural disasters, hurricanes, torrential monsoons, droughts.” Indeed. And we do have some idea of where the threats are going to be concentrated, and therefore where agrobiodiversity will be most needed.
Exploring a Sarajevo market
I spent an interesting hour or so with Elcio exploring an open-air fruit and vegetable market in central Sarajevo last week. I think it is the very same market which was tragically attacked during the war with much loss of life. No sign of that now, thankfully, except for a memorial to the victims.
You can see some pictures of the fruit and vegetable diversity on display on my Flickr page. Here I just want to point out two curiosities. Or at least they were to me. Here’s the first.
This lady is selling necklaces of dried, perhaps immature but certainly small, okra fruits, called bamia in Bosnian (and indeed in Arabic for that matter). They are soaked in water and vinegar for a few minutes, then added to fried onions and meat to make a local stew. Or that’s what a lady buying some told us. I bought some and will try it. I’d never heard of okra being used in this dried form.
The second thing that came as a surprise to me was this fruit. Sorry I don’t have a decent picture of it being sold in the market.
Clearly some kind of Physalis, perhaps P. alkekengi? It was being sold a few fruits at a time, so probably for medicinal purposes (LATER: or as ornaments?) rather than food. I couldn’t communicate with the lady selling it, the only one in the market. Any ideas?
Nibbles: Yeast, Weeds, Bioprospecting, Iraq, Pine wilt, Vietnam, GM, GM, Insects, Bees, Sheep, Fowl
- Boffins to brew Jurassic Park beer.
- Boffins fingerprint weeds.
- Boffins scour arctic for antifreeze proteins.
- Boffins to reclaim Garden of Eden.
- Boffins fight to save pines in Europe.
- Boffins improve production of rice and fruits in Mekong Delta.
- Boffins to spend $US3.5billion on GM in China.
- Boffin “disgraces himself”.
- Boffin says insects are agrobiodiversity too.
- Boffin wants you to plant sunflowers and count bees. Other boffins dig up evidence of bliblical beekeeping.
- Boffins find endogenous retroviruses in sheep different to ones in wild relatives. Via.
- Boffins kill beautiful theory about pre-Columbian chickens with ugly fact.
Climate change risk hotspots mapped
A SciDevNet piece on the report “Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots” says that
The report, commissioned by CARE International and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), identifies Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and Pakistan as countries particularly vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.
But actually, looking at the map on page 26 from an agrobiodiversity conservation point of view, the countries I’d target — for germplasm collecting, for example — are Mozambique, Madagascar and Vietnam. The authors looked at flood, cyclone and drought risk. These countries are in for all three.
LATER: At least Cuba doesn’t seem to be at much increased threat, which is just as well!