The Forests Asia Summit 2014 starts today, with the usual panoply of social media accoutrements. Let’s get #forestasia trending, shall we? The landscape perspective seems to be to the fore, so there should be at least some dialogue with agriculture. You can let us know about it here, if you like.
Nibbles: Food future, Bean breeding 101, Yield gaps, Mitigation strategies, Sparing vs sharing, Diverse diets, Open seeds, Fake seeds, Florida citrus threat, Hot chicks, Nutrition nuggets
- Food? We don’t need no stinking food.
- Bean breeder begs to differ.
- Where we could do with more food.
- Nobody’s talking about mitigation any more. Oh yes they are.
- Land shparing is the answer.
- ICRAF decides to gather evidence for the benefits of agroforestry for nutrition.
- More on those open source seeds. Which I hope nobody will counterfeit.
- Florida needs new grapefruits, whether open source or not.
- Naked neck chickens look weird, but they may be really heat resistant, so get over it. Ghana has.
- Canadian grad students summarize nutrition research in a pithy sentence. Sound familiar?
For the well-being of one and all on the planet Earth
The four largest national collections in the world are located in the USA, Russia, India and China. The National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) in the USA and the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) in Russia are both in the process of backing-up their collections at Svalbard, while the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) in India has signed the SDA, but has not yet started safety duplication. The Institute of Crop Germplasm Resources (ICGR-CAAS) in China is not participating so far. Out of the five other national institutions with more than 100,000 accessions in storage, the national genebank in Japan is not currently a depositor, whereas the national genebanks in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the Republic of Korea have all deposited seeds at Svalbard. The most significant origin country gap is India… However, safety duplication of the Indian collections is expected in the future…
That’s from a recent PLOS paper “Global Ex-Situ Crop Diversity Conservation and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: Assessing the Current Status.” And it’s out of date, because the future is now. Though it may be a small step, it’s a significant step, and the message on the box, from which we take our title, says it all.
Nibbles: Global plant cover, Veggies in Africa, Ancient middens, Raspberry fruit colour, Citrus greening, Jordan biodiversity, US nutrition, Subsidies, Seed and voucher fair, Bean diversity, Grape mildew fight
- GIS geeks sort out land cover at last.
- Role of vegetables in combating malnutrition in Africa. Author offers pdf of paper.
- Ancient native American middens just keep on giving.
- Raspberry colour good predictor of various fruit post-harvest characteristics. Good short-cut for breeders.
- Getting to the root of citrus greening. Scary disease.
- Freaky stuff about using frog eggs to figure out the genetics of grapevine’s susceptibility to another scary disease.
- Video of our friend Dr Nigel Maxted on Jordan’s socioeconomically important plants.
- Physician, heal thyself. Indian tells USAID to take care of its own food insecurity.
- How to create subsidies that promote biodiversity, in a model, which is probably highly unrealistic.
- Very realistic notes from a seed and voucher fair in Malawi.
- And anecdotes on the benefits of bean diversity in Uganda.
Embrapa’s new genebank illustrated
If we missed reporting the opening of Embrapa’s new genebank, 1 it’s because the news seems only to have come out in the Brazilian press.
A modern building of over two thousand square feet, divided into two floors, will house one of the largest collections of genetic resources and is the third largest facility in the world in terms of storage capacity. Opened on the morning of April 24, the new genebank started the celebrations of 41 years of Embrapa.
If you search around, you’ll find various photos of the interior of the new building, but I could not find a single one of the outside. So here goes. It was taken a couple of months ago. I expect it’s all tidied up now.
For completeness, the green building in this last shot is the old genebank, which is next door to the new one.
