- Tonga joins the ITPGRFA. About time too. I started talking to them about it 10 years ago.
- What exactly does it mean to be “amped” about seeds? And do they have to be organic? And do these Filipino ones qualify?
- Enough with the banana scare stories already!
- Go on, nominate someone for the World Food Prize.
- Mushroom beer? Yeah, ok.
- USDA waxes nerdy about cover crops.
- Gateses’ Big Bet for African agriculture. Move along, nothing to see here.
Chefs help conserve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
I believe we have Nibbled both of these articles, but I think they could stand another few minutes in the limelight. One describes how self-described “farmer-scientist” Dr Brian Ward of Clemson University — with a little help from his friends — is bringing back from near extinction a peanut variety called Carolina Africa Runner:
Luckily, in the 1940s North Carolina State University collected samples of a variety of peanuts during a breeding program, and the Carolina’s germplasm was preserved.
The second article is about maverick Washington State University breeder Dr Stephen Jones’s attempts to come up with better tasting bread.
Several years ago, he started a project called the Bread Lab, a Washington State program that approaches grain breeding with a focus on the eventual culinary end goal. The idea came about because Jones says he was tired of the USDA and Big Ag dictating the traits that he needed to breed for. “They would tell us [a certain wheat variety] doesn’t make a good loaf of bread. Well, what they meant was an industrial, high-speed, mixing, full of junk, white — just lily-white — bread,” Jones says. “And we didn’t want that opinion, so we had nowhere to go.”
WhatOne of the several things the stories have in common is the involvement of chefs. Now, there must also be one out there interested in heirloom fruits. Then we could bring them all together…
Nibbles: CGRFA, Kew crop job, CC and PGRFA, MAGIC, SDGs, Bushmeat, Biofortification, Protecting trees, Wild coffee, Money honey, Nutmeg story, Colonial cooking, Armenian food
- The Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research breaks down this week’s Fifteenth Regular Session of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture for ya.
- Kew looking for a crop person! I wonder if the successful candidate is in Rome today.
- Mauricio Bellon on why smallholder farmers need crop diversity to adapt to climate change. He’s in Rome.
- Multi-Parent Advanced Generation Inter Cross (MAGIC) deconstructed. Compare and contrast with above.
- The SDGs in one cool interactive infographic. But where’s nutrition?
- Where is overhunting for bushmeat occurring? Gotta get your nutrition where you can…
- Want to invest in a biofortified crop like iron beans? Here’s how to work out where you should do it. Interesting to cross-reference with that bushmeat thing above?
- Ancient Greek tree preservation order.
- Ethiopian forest dwellers protect wild coffee. No preservation orders needed.
- Tracking honey. Follow the money.
- Could say the same about nutmeg.
- Meat stew with garden eggs. Sounds yummie. Not much used in Kenya these days any more, alas.
- Delving into Armenian Ottoman foods. Because we can. No sign of garden eggs.
ABS on genetic resources straight from the horse’s mouth
Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), recently gave a very nice, clear answer to a question on the relationship between the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) regimes of the CBD and of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. It was at the Special Event on Food Security and Genetic Diversity at FAO last Friday, which preceded the Fifteenth Regular Session of the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources, which started yesterday. You can hear what he says in a couple of different ways. You can fast forward to about 2:07:30 in the video of the event on the FAO website, and watch for about 3 minutes. Or, if you don’t mind only listening, you can click below. Dr Ferreira de Souza Dias focuses on Annex 1 of the Treaty, but of course the collections listed under Article 15 are in the same boat. The questioner is my old friend Desterio Nyamongo, head of Kenya’s genebank.
European livestock breed conservation assessed
A further addition to the mass of online information on livestock genetic resources around the world. It’s the final report of the SUBSIBREED project, providing and “Overview and assessment of support measures for endangered livestock breeds” in Europe. It was put together by the European Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP), which is hosted by the Information and Coordination Centre for Biological Diversity (IBV) of the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE)
in Bonn, Germany. I suppose the information will eventually find its way into the relevant databases?
