- Yams heading for trouble. What to do?
- Learn something from wild relatives, like they’re doing with tomatoes?
- Go for a totally new plant breeding paradigm?
- I know, let’s all go out and celebrate World Bamboo Day!
Precarious, moi?
In the United States, there is no general consciousness of the precarious state of global agriculture.
That’s from economist Tyler Cowen in the NY Times. One solution might be to start with the precarious state of US agriculture. David Lobell could help with that. But then, if you can increase food exports in the face of a giant drought, what does that say about the state of your agriculture? And to anyone who can synthesize all that, a big thank you.
Nibbles: Organic breeding, Agroforestry, Metallophytes, Fermentation, Grain storage
- Meta-analysis or no meta-analysis, breeders still want to breed for organic conditions.
- Farm Radio does tree farming.
- A plea for metallophytes. Every damn plant group has a lobby these days. I bet some of them are crop wild relatives though.
- As does almost every style of food preparation. Although I have to say I myself can never read enough about fermentation.
- This video is advertised as being about food preservation, and I was going to link it to the above, but it turns out to be about seed storage. Which is interesting enough, and important too, but not the same thing. A clever video, which I personally think doesn’t in the end make its point.
African universities get together on agriculture
The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a consortium of 29 universities in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, was established in 2004. The consortium originally operated as a program of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1992. RUFORUM has a mandate to oversee graduate training and networks of specialization in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) countries. Specifically, RUFORUM recognizes the important and largely unfulfilled role that universities play in contributing to the well-being of small-scale farmers and economic development of countries throughout the sub-Saharan Africa region. We strongly believe in Innovative and Responsive Research, High Performing Proactive Graduates, A Dynamic Platform for University Networking, Advocacy for Agricultural Higher Education and University Transformation for Relevance.
Of course, it has its full complement of social networking tools, including a blog. Searching around reveals at least one resource on agrobiodiversity. No doubt there’s more.
Looking for agrobiodiversity on Top Ten lists
It is a diverting exercise to look for the intersection between the “Ten moments that changed history,” according to Andrew Marr’s new history of the world, and the Royal Society’s list of the “most significant invention[s] in the history of food and drink.” So I’ll leave it to you.