The First International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is on at Interlaken, Switzerland. Earth Negotiations Bulletin is providing daily reports. The first official press release is also out. Are you there? Would you like to tell us what is going on? Drop us a line.
Genebanks in the news
Are genebanks becoming sexy or something? In the past few days there have been:
- a VOA News piece on the USDA-ARS Plant Genetic Resources Unit at the Geneva, NY campus of Cornell University, focusing on their world-famous apple collection;
- an article in Farm & Ranch Guide on the USDA’s Small Grains Collection at the University of Idaho’s Research and Extension Center at Aberdeed; and
- an article in Kauai Garden Island News on how to prepare breadfruit which resulted from a cook-off at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens, home of the world’s largest breadfruit collection.
Amidst all the recent media frenzy about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, it is good to see “normal” genebanks also featured in the news every once in a while.
Native potato marketing wins prize
It never rains but it pours. Peter Ballantyne from AgInfo News has sent us information on another attempt to forge “intelligent markets” linking small rural producers with urban consumers. T’ikapapa, “which packs and markets specially selected Peruvian native potatoes,” has just won a SEED Award. It is part of the Papa Andina Project coordinated by CIP and funded by Swiss Development Cooperation. The SEED initiative is Supporting Entrepreneurs for Environment and Development.
In vino veritas
Thanks to Ola Westengen for contributing this post.
Serendipity seems to be the modus operandi of this great blog and so is the case with this post. On a trip last Sunday to look at this Etruscan world heritage site outside Cerveteri I stumbled into a Sagra dell’Uva –a town festival to celebrate the grape. I took the picture shown below and had some great Cerveteri Bianco Secco before walking on to the amazing Etruscan ruins. Then back in the office I came across a news item from the latest edition of Nature about the newly published sequence of the grapevine genome. The French-Italian consortium of researchers has read the half billion letter book of life of the variety Pinot Noir.
The draft sequence of the grapevine genome is the fourth one produced so far for flowering plants, the second for a woody species and the first for a fruit crop. Grapevine was selected because of its important place in the cultural heritage of humanity beginning during the Neolithic period.
The authors cite the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote that Mediterranean people began to emerge from ignorance when they learnt to cultivate olives and grapes. I’m still ignorant, but it is starting to dawn on me that vine buffs must be some of the best perpetuators and celebrators of agricultural biodiversity — just take a look at the variety list on Wikipedia.
Indications of origin
China and EU agree on DOC. Someone mention zeitgeist?