Author: Luigi Guarino

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For royalty or for all?

You still have time to arrange to listen to the AgTalks session on “forgotten food crops,” from which I’ve borrowed the title of this post.

AgTalks presents the latest thinking, trends and research on policies and innovation in small-scale farming. This session, titled “For royalty or for all? Amaranth, teff, millet and cassava,” is intended to raise awareness about forgotten food crops that were once central to people’s diet centuries ago. These lost crops have huge nutritional value and economic potential, just waiting to be rediscovered.

The webcast is just waiting to be discovered on the IFAD website. It starts in about half an hour…

LATER: And thanks to the organizers (IFAD) for taking my question over Twitter. Fascinating to hear from Mary M. Delano Frier that when she started her work in Mexico using amaranth to improve kids’ nutrition in schools, she had to get material from the USA genebank. That’s now changed, apparently.

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Brainfood: IPR in breeding, Cryo costs, Undervalued spp, Biodiversity change drivers, Cassava proteins, Sorghum seed sources

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Tracking SDG 2, unofficially and preliminarly

The unofficial Preliminary Sustainable Development Goal Index and Dashboard are (is?) out, courtesy of SDSN, and open for comment. Here’s the list of indicators they used (click to embiggen).

Screen Shot 2016-04-01 at 1.33.42 PM

Focus on the indicators relating to SDG 2, which is “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.” That would be the following:

  • Prevalence of undernourishment (% of population)
  • Cereal yield (kg/ha)

Uhm. What happened to the double burden of malnutrition? And both rice and pearl millet are cereals: do we really want to use the yield of such a nutritionally narrow but agronomically heterogenous crop category to track agricultural development globally? Also, not much there relating specifically to Target 2.5:

2.5 by 2020 maintain genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants, farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at national, regional and international levels, and ensure access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge as internationally agreed.

Because we do now have a good indicator, and indeed a decent baseline, for some aspects of that.