Luigi Guarino

The beginning of a panic about the garlic deficit with China? Via Food Museum Blog.

June 22, 2007

Potholes on the Tequila Trail

Tequila vs maize in the homeland of both.

June 22, 2007June 22, 2007

From a cold and wet Addis Ababa

I’m spending the week here for work and could not resist the temptation to do some advertising for Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation, one of the world’s premier genebanks. So check out their website. And read a bit about them in the news.

June 21, 2007

Controlling bacterial wilt

Another reason why intercropping is a good idea.

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

Author: Luigi Guarino

Microbial resources

Garlic in the press

Potholes on the Tequila Trail

From a cold and wet Addis Ababa

Controlling bacterial wilt