- The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
- AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
- CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
- IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
- Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
- Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
- Your mama is a llama.
- The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
- Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
- Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
- VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
- Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?
Featured: Ed Percival
David Williams remembers Ed Percival:
Ed’s father was working for the United Fruit Company in Guatemala where he met and married Ed’s mother, a Guatemalan. Ed was born at the United Fruit Company hospital in Quiriguá, an archaeological site on the Rio Motagua, famous for its incomparable array of Mayan stelae, one of which is featured on the country’s 10 centavo coin.
There’s more, check it out.
Nibbles: Musa taxonomy kerfuffle, Vouchers, Foodies, Aroid roundup, MAS is ok, Sierra Leone conservation
- Banana boffins at each others’ throats over alleged new species. Great spectator sport.
- What does a Musa voucher specimen look like, I wonder.
- Fancy shmanzy Bangkok restaurant links up with heirloom seedbank.
- Aroid network working really hard.
- Marker-assisted selection: a biotechnology we can all get behind. Can’t we?
- Conservation in Sierra Leone. No agrobiodiversity, natch.
Cotton doyen passes away
Sad to hear that Dr Ed Percival, a world expert on cotton and its genetic resources, passed away last month. He collected wild and cultivated germplasm widely, and he was formerly curator of the USDA cotton germplasm collection at College Station, Texas, one of the more important in the world. 1
Kermit sings the malnutrition blues
When you start really looking out for something, you quickly get to wondering how you could possibly have missed it all before. Case in point: maps of the USA which hint at “a complex association where interactions between a variety of factors could produce reinforcing effects.” That’s in the words of an Annals of Botany Google+ pointer to a recent post of ours here which included maps of obesity and food insecurity and mused vaguely about the coolness of mashups.
After that, of course I started seeing such maps everywhere. Of renewable resources, including biomass. Of landuse. Of poverty. Of, errr, the names of soft drinks.
Some regions jump up at you during the even briefest of looks at the maps of poverty, obesity and food insecurity. Like the Mississippi Valley, for instance. So it is at least somewhat reassuring that other people have noticed that too, and are doing something about it. Even doing multiple things about it, in fact. USDA probably didn’t need fancy maps to identify this particular nexus of deprivation, but maybe there are others that are not so obvious, and which an in-depth perusal of these maps will bring to light. Along with, hopefully, some possible solutions. Even if they are only farmers markets.
But to end on a lighter note, this region is not just known for poverty and malnutrition. The blues came from there, of course, but also, ahem, Kermit the Frog. In fact, there’s a connection between our green friend and agriculture. I am reliably informed that Jim Henson’s father was superintendent of the USDA-ARS research station in Stoneville, MS and worked closely with researchers there. Perhaps Kermit should be asked to spread the nutrition and exercise message around his old hopping grounds? I can’t think of a more suitable role model.