Luigi Guarino

October 3, 2007October 3, 2007

Wild blueberries thrive in Canada

Climate change causes blueberry war.

October 3, 2007October 3, 2007

Farmer breeder wants to patent variety

The story of Sebastian Joseph, Kerala farmer, who developed a great new variety of cardamom, but doesn’t think he has profited from it as much as he should have.

October 3, 2007

World Development special issue

Property Rights, Collective Action, and Local Conservation of Genetic Resources.

October 2, 2007

Alfred H. Peet dies

The “grandfather of specialty coffee” goes to the big caffÃ¨ in the sky.

October 2, 2007

Italian fruit on show

Blast, I missed the Mostra Pomologica!

1. Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
2. Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
3. When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
4. The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
5. Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
6. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
7. New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Published on October 6, 2026