International meet on agrobiodiversity
UC Davis is organizing a follow-up to the international symposium held in Aleppo, Syria in 1997 under the name of “The Origins of Agriculture and the Domestication of Crop Plants in the Near East.” Also dedicated to Jack R. Harlan (1917–1998), celebrated agricultural botanist and plant explorer, the 2008 conference is entitled “Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, & Sustainability.” If you’re planning to go, how about reporting on the conference for our readers at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog?
Marijuana displaces poppies
Afghan farmers diversify. Cheech and Chong unavailable for comment.
Another blogger in China
Looks like Jeremy is not the only foreigner with an interest in agriculture blogging his way around China. Jim Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 1 “is blogging from China as he meets with experts on China’s food and farm system.” I wonder if he and Jeremy will meet up somewhere? If they do, I bet it will be at a market or banquet.
Down on the levee
A riverine trifecta today, describing threats to the biodiversity — including agrobiodiversity — associated with major rivers around the world…
From Italy, news that students and teachers from the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Pollenzo (founded in 2004 by Slow Food guru Carlo Petrini) — over 150 of them — Â will travel down the Po River watershed by bicycle and boat in September and October. They’ll be giving the river and its valley a source-to-delta checkup, they say, diagnosing their ills but also identifying their abiding strengths — ecological, cultural and, presumably, agricultural.
Further east, Hubert von Goisern, an Austrian musician, has done something similar — but in his own way — for the Danube. He’s spent the summer giving a series of concerts down the river for a WWF campaign to raise awareness of the damage that planned development projects will do to the habitat of the Danube sturgeon. Plans to straighten and deepen the course of the river to facilitate shipping are expected to affect a thousand-kilometer stretch, destroying a unique natural and cultural heritage.
And further east still, Nguyen Huu Chgiem, the son of a Mekong delta rice farmer, reflects on how climate change, deforestation and saltwater intrusion are affecting Vietnam’s “rice basket.” And what he can do about it now that he’s a professor of environment and natural resources management.