- Companies should pay to protect ecosystems.
- Like these? Hope they include some agricultural ones. Maybe even urban ones.
- Why you’d want to is not least because of these plants. Which can be better for micronutrients. Not to mention mainly outcrossing.
- Yeah, not all species are equal. Right?
- I wonder if any of this philanthropic training money will go to work on rice wild relatives.
Hedges, pledges and edges
Everybody’s calling the Nutrition4Growth at the weekend a great success, perhaps a game-changer.
The EC, The Gates Foundation, and the World Bank committed leverage the billions that are already spend on agriculture to impact on nutrition. These pledges are impressive — not least the eye popping $4bn from the EC.
Even, though with various caveats, the ever-cynical Laurence Haddad, from whose reality-checking post our title is nicked. Fingers crossed.
LATER: And here’s the CGIAR’s take on it all.
Featured: Peaches
Mary Winfree Found our post “Churros and peaches in the Canyon de Chelly” useful:
My back yard holds a sacred place and cemetery, we found it when a neighbor tried to build a road right up to my back door and the bones came up. We brought in Cadaver dogs who revealed a whole cemetery. It was a blessing in disguise because when we went to replant the bones of my little Indian Grandmother, there were more bones from the same tribe, that needed a home. They had been buried and then disturbed by a big hiway, and no place had been found for them. Now they will join the ones in my yard. We are holding a homecoming party for them. Songs both sad and happy, a BBQ and where they are replanted they are planting peach trees – now I know what that means…
We’re glad we were able to help a little.
Brainfood: Maize domestication, Restoration success, Rare species, Pollinator loss, Diversity and productivity, Cacao/coffee & ecosystem services, Brazilian coffee, GM cotton benefits
- Genetics and Consequences of Crop Domestication. The domestication bottleneck has consequences.
- Evaluating Ecological Restoration Success: A Review of the Literature. There’s more of it going on. Evaluation, that is. Which is good. But still mainly from the USA and Australia, and not enough of the socioeconomic kind.
- Rare Species Support Vulnerable Functions in High-Diversity Ecosystems. Ecosystems are distinctive because of their rare species.
- Environmental factors driving the effectiveness of European agri-environmental measures in mitigating pollinator loss — a meta-analysis. We know how to lessen, but not how to mitigate, loss of pollinators.
- Experimental evidence that evolutionarily diverse assemblages result in higher productivity. And the more distantly related the species, the higher the productivity gain.
- A global meta-analysis of the biodiversity and ecosystem service benefits of coffee and cacao agroforestry. Agroforests better than plantations, but forests best of all.
- Coefficient of Parentage in Coffea arabica L. Cultivars Grown in Brazil. Be afraid.
- Genetically Modified Crops and Food Security. Turns out GM cotton has increased the income and thus improved the diets of adopting Indian farmers. Well, maybe.
Nibbles: Pretty, Peak soil, Wine history, Ancient foodways, Offal, Durian, Exotic plant foods, Cassava, Mozzarella, Nutrition report, Superfoods
- Jules Pretty meditates on the impermanence of things.
- Like soil. And bumblebees.
- Ah, well, let’s not get maudlin. Pass the bottle. Well looky here. The French got wine from the Italians. I feel better already.
- And Canadians had clam gardens a thousand years ago. Probably still do, actually.
- Along with offal, no doubt. Which did not, however, seem to play any role in a recent Mesolithic dinner. Though French wine did. Which is weird.
- The best fruit in the world gets the Kew treatment.
- And is included in a weird list of the 100 weirdest food plants.
- Cassava‘s pretty weird too.
- The best cheese in the world is not French either.
- All of which foods no doubt feature in FAO’s new report on nutrition. Which is really important, so don’t let the flippancy fool ya. The Lancet agrees. And you can do your bit too.
- Ah, but does quinoa feature in that FAO report? The backlash continues…