- What is sustainable intensification? Views from experts. Ambiguous term which may not signify a departure from current practice anyway. Ecological intensification instead?
- Intellectual Property Rights Access to Genetic Resources and Indian Shrimp Aquaculture: Evolving Policy Responses to Globalization. I kid you not.
- Patterns of Domestication in the Ethiopian Oil-seed Crop Noug (Guizotia abyssinica). Weirdness, for a domesticated crop, not due to its wild relative messing things up. What it is due to is a “mystery.” Thanks, authors.
- Bio-Banking on Neglected and Underutilized Plant Genetic Resources of Nigeria: Potential for Nutrient and Food Security. Never even heard of some of these.
- Comparison of different Ocimum basilicum L. gene bank accessions analyzed by GC–MS and sensory profile. Among 12 cultivars in the Hungarian genebank, there are 5 distinct smell profiles. That actually seems quite a lot.
- The role of cultural ecosystem services in landscape management and planning. Sometimes, they can hold you back.
- Carbon farming via assisted natural regeneration as a cost-effective mechanism for restoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. It can be a viable use of land in parts of Queensland, depending on the price of C.
- Ethnobotany of a threatened medicinal plant “Indravan” (Cucumis callosus) from central India. Cucumber wild relatives also medicinal.
Crowdsourcing oca improvement
As any breeder will tell you at least once during any conversation you may have with them, crop improvement is a numbers game. Which makes it a very hard game for the so-called minor crops. Not enough money and not enough people limit the sheer number of crosses that can be made and new plants that can be evaluated, so progress is slow. Enter the internet: “Thanks to social media and the internet, amateur breeders can swap huge amounts of information.” That’s Owen, a breeder of ocas and other things tuberous down in Cornwall, as featured a couple of days ago in the gardening section of The Guardian. If you’d like to help the world develop day-length neutral oca varieties, you can follow Owen on Facebook and Twitter and join his Guild of Oca Breeders.
Brainfood: Camelina improvement, School garden impact, Biodiversity rice, Seed networks, Indian wheat geography, Protected areas, Late blight resistance, Peanut biotech
- Camelina as a sustainable oilseed crop: Contributions of plant breeding and genetic engineering. It will help that it’s close to Arabidopsis.
- Sustenance and sustainability: maximizing the impact of school gardens on health outcomes. You need proper experimental design if you’re going to say that such an impact exists. But such an impact probably exists, sometimes.
- Consumer preferences for agricultural products considering the value of biodiversity conservation in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Consumers are willing to pay extra for crane-friendly rice. Or at least they say they are.
- An Analysis of Social Seed Network and Its Contribution to On-Farm Conservation of Crop Genetic Diversity in Nepal. Fancy software shows farmers exchange seeds, and it’s important.
- Spatial Distribution of Trait-specific Diversity in Indian Wheat Collections. From 5930, 3973 are geo-referenced, showing where more collections need to be made. Unless of course they are among those 1957 and nobody can tell.
- Walk on the Wild Side: Estimating the Global Magnitude of Visits to Protected Areas. 8 billion visits per year (80% in Europe and North America), generating $600 billion per year in direct in-country expenditure and $250 billion in consumer surplus. Remember that we spent $10 billion per year worldwide in safeguarding protected areas.
- Allele Mining in Solanum Germplasm: Cloning and Characterization of RB-Homologous Gene Fragments from Late Blight Resistant Wild Potato Species. 17 gene fragments from 11 wild potato species could be useful in breeding for late blight resistance.
- Genetic diversity of the world’s largest oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) field genebank accessions using microsatellite markers. Extreme West Africa group, West-Central-East Africa group and Madagascar group, with the last quite distinct.
- Progress in genetic engineering of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) — A review. Our jetpacks are in the mail.
Prioritizing FAO’s food composition work
Via the International Network of Food Data Systems (INFOODS) discussion list we hear from FAO’s Ruth Charrondiere that:
…FAO’s “Medium Term Plan 2014-17 (reviewed) and Programme of Work and Budget 2016-17” … states on p.21: “Nutrition: in realigning and strengthening work on nutrition in follow-up to ICN2, 1 reduce work on nutrition education curricular development and some food composition work.” (emphasis added)
This came as a surprise, apparently, because
…the evaluation of FAO’s role and work in nutrition of 2011 recommended exactly the contrary: see p.14 and recommendation 7.
Part of that recommendation was for
…FAO to build capacity at the regional and sub-regional levels, encourage regional collaboration to support countries (especially focal countries) to collect and analyse food composition data that is demanded by end-users for ensuring the nutrition sensitivity of policies and programme interventions.
Which seems very sensible. A good part of the food composition data work, of course, has focused on within-crop diversity in nutritional quality, which is why this proposed reduction is of interest to us here. Or maybe the powers that be at FAO are simply declaring victory, having decided that they have achieved what they wanted in this area. Anyway, you get to have your say, because
In order to know which part of our work is the least relevant for countries, and thus could be de-emphasized, I designed a survey which I hope many of you will complete ASAP. Please disseminate it widely also to colleagues who work on food composition.
Nibbles: Old pretzel, Wine podcast, Nordic podcast, Tea history, Pacific pests app, Eating bugs, Chicken history, African superfoods, Gender, Access to seeds, Sorghum beer, Making mead, Cumin, Bolivian school meals, MLN, Hidden hunger conference, CIP & IK, Potato Park, CIP’s Sawyer, Saving wheat, Resettlement, Sustainable cacao, Deforestation map, Language map
Again, sorry for slow blogging last week. Work, you know. Here we play catch-up.
- While we were away, we reached 6000 Twitter followers! Thanks, everyone!
- And Germans found a 250-year-old pretzel. Wait, you can get those at Kamps every day though. (Bonn inside joke.)
- Oh, and Jeremy talked to a wine expert about how to become a wine expert.
- But he has competition from the Nordic Food Lab now. What are you waiting for, subscribe to both!
- Since we’re on podcasts, Laszlo Montgomery’s monumental ten-part blockbuster on the history of tea in China recently came to a close.
- Talking of iTunes, ver. 2 of the Pacific Pest and Pathogens app is out.
- Don’t want to get into the whole eating insects thing? Feed them to your chickens instead.
- There’s even an infographic about that now.
- But what will it do to the poor old chicken?
- Cooking up some African superfoods. No insects (or chickens) were harmed in the making of this article.
- Yeah but who will be doing the cooking?
- And where to get the seeds? Maybe African Seed Access Index will help, though I somehow doubt it. At least for baobab.
- Oh well, there’s always beer I guess. (Though even that you can’t take for granted these days.)
- Or mead, at a pinch.
- I bet the Sumerians put a pinch of cumin in their beer. And mead.
- What about Latin America superfoods, though? Bolivians put them in their school meals, that’s what.
- Maize was a Latin American superfood once. Having trouble in Africa now, though.
- Wait, what, there was a 2nd International Congress on Hidden Hunger at the University of Hohenheim last week? And all I got was this t-shirt? Any superfoods on the menu there, I wonder?
- CIP on how it deals with traditional knowledge.
- For example at the Potato Park. Where I’ll be next week, incidentally. Stay tuned… But again, I rather fear that blogging will be on the light side next week.
- CIP has come a long way since its first DG, Dr Richard L. Sawyer, who sadly just passed away.
- Modelling the effects of climate change on wheat. Again. Can never have enough data. Anyway, wild relatives the answer?
- Mongolian nomads settle down. And not in a good way.
- There’s more to sustainable cacao than productivity. Fortunately, some people are on that. Meanwhile, at the other end of the poverty spectrum…
- Don’t think I’ve ever seen a nerdy interactive map like Global Forest Watch go mainstream. Hope for us all. Mash it up with this next?