- The Parque de la Papa will save us all.
- David Fairchild tried to save us all.
- Gardens in Florence and Warsaw team up to save citrus oddities.
- Save land through indigenous mapping.
Mainstreaming agrobiodiversity for nutrition
A new discussion paper from GAIN, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, looks at some indicative Policies and financing to spur appropriate private-sector engagement in food systems. “Appropriate” meaning conducive to the production and consumption of more agrobiodiverse diets. It’s not long, so you should probably read the whole thing. But here are the take-home messages, to whet your appetite, as it were:
- reduce taxes and increase subsidies on nutritious crops and foods (eg fruits and vegetables)
- amend policies which encourage biofortification and industrial fortification to also include encouraging the increased production and consumption of existing nutritious species and varieties
- make the case for diverse farming systems to impact investors and blended finance practitioners
- nudge business sustainability strategies to include biodiversity and ecosystem considerations (eg, via the Agrobiodiversity Index)
Not a comprehensive list, of course, but a pretty good start.
A president checks his herd
It’s not every day you see a long Twitter thread on agricultural biodiversity from an actual president.
Recently, I was in Kisozi and Rwakitura, checking on my cattle. I thought it wise to share a few facts about some of the cows. pic.twitter.com/uKK50vQIwR
— Yoweri K Museveni (@KagutaMuseveni) November 27, 2019
Do bananas next, Mr President?
Nibbles: GB8, Aqueduct, Soviet tea, Tilapia virus, Quelites, NUS, Golden Thread, China Neolithic, Organic maize
- Virginia Gewin on GB8.
- Mapping water risks around the world.
- The decline and rise of Georgian tea.
- Virus hits tilapia. A lot of people could be hurt.
- Amaranthus in Mexico.
- Just one of many relatively neglected crops around the world that shouldn’t be.
- How wheat took over China. That was kinda underused at first too.
- Long webinar on organic maize breeding. Amaranthus next?
- The rise of fabric.
PGR training needs identified
There’s an open access Crop Science Special Issue out under the title: Connecting Agriculture, Public Gardens and Science. Well worth having a look at. There’s great stuff on crop wild relatives, plant awareness, chefs, and trans-situ conservation, just to give you a flavour. There’s also a summary of the symposium that gave rise to the special issue. Our friend Colin Khoury was closely involved.
I’ll just highlight here the paper by Gayle Volk and others on training needs in plant genetic resources conservation. 1 The authors sent out a survey and analyzed the feedback from 425 respondents by type of institution: academia, NPGS, CGIAR, national genebanks, NGOs and the private sector. There were, fortunately, some topics which a majority across all institutions considered high priority areas for training:
- accessing information
- crop wild relatives
- genotyping
- phenotyping
- intellectual property and regulatory issues
But there were also some differences.
The respondents from academia were also interested … in prebreeding, which is not surprising because many of these respondents were plant breeders. Respondents from the private sector were also interested … in requests/distributions and prebreeding, and respondents from NGOs were also interested … in collection gap analyses, explorations, germplasm preservation, intellectual property, and regulations. The genebank respondents (NPGS, CGIAR, non-NPGS government) considered germplasm preservation, intellectual property, and general concepts in plant genetic diversity as priority topics. These differences among the institutional types are not surprising due to their different missions.
This all came out of an initiative from the NPGS that started back in early 2018. Training materials of various types are being developed. Will keep you posted.