Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The latest of Mitsuaki Tanabe’s monuments to wild rice was unveiled in the FAO building in Rome yesterday. Tanabe has donated this sculpture to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and it is now installed by a window just in front of the Trust’s offices. Representing a seed of Oryza meridionalis, which is found in northern Australia, “Momi-2008” is about 9 m long and about 250 kg in weight. It took 20 men to get it up the stairs. This photo doesn’t really do it justice.
Bruce French taught Food Crop Production at Vudal University in the 1970s and wrote a number of books on the food plants of PNG. These are now sadly out of print, but fear not. I’ll let him take up the story:
In recent years I have continued to put together information for PNG, along with my wider project of trying to describe all the food plants of the world. At this stage I have several books written, available as computerised books in pdf format, on Food Plants, Pests and Diseases and Food Composition for PNG. These are all available on the website, www.foodplantsinternational.com, and can be downloaded. As they are fairly large books, and may take a while to download, it may be easier for me to send them to people within PNG on DVD/CD. There are also other resources such as photos, databases, etc. that could also be made available. The information should be useful for agriculture workers, teachers, health workers and other interested people.
You can find the publications here. They’re wonderful.
Via Didinet Issue 8, 2008 (not online).
It was only just over a year ago that I wrote, from Nairobi, a post about silk making in Kenya that elicited a number of comments. Seems like a lifetime ago. Anyway, today there’s an article in Science in Africa about attempts to make an industry out of wild silk in southern Africa. Sounds very promising. Via.
The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:
The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.
It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.