Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
You may remember that I pointed to Freakonomics Blog a few days ago because they had a nice little feature where people could ask an illustrious agricultural economist pointed questions. Well the answers are now up. Here’s my favourite one:
Q: Are there any good arguments that support farm subsidies?
A: No.
Actually that’s a bit unfair, there is more to the answer than that. Check it out. And let us know if you want something similar here on agrobiodiversity.
Couldn’t resist this shot the other evening. Those are capers clinging to the remains of the Ponte Rotto in Rome. Wonder if anyone ever collects them. Not so much hidden harvest as hard-to-reach harvest.
Nixtamalization is unquestionably a good thing. Without it
…maize is a much less beneficial foodstuff, and malnutrition struck many areas where it became a dominant food crop. In the nineteenth century, pellagra epidemics were recorded in France, Italy, and Egypt, and kwashiorkor hit parts of Africa where maize had become a dietary staple.
So the question is, why hasn’t alkaline processing been introduced to Africa? Or perhaps it has, and my ignorance is showing again; but if so, why hasn’t it been widely adopted? Ideas, anyone?
PROTA is an international, not-for-profit foundation. It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information through Webdatabases, Books, CD-Rom’s and Special Products.
I knew that, but hadn’t checked out progress on the centrepiece database in a while. Until today. I couldn’t get the “word wheel” thing to work, whatever that is, but the search function seems to work fine and the actual content is great. Now, why not link to GBIF?