West African food composition data by variety
Good news from FAO:
West African Food Composition Table / Table de composition des aliments d’Afrique de l’Ouest is available on the INFOODS website (http://www.fao.org/infoods/tables_africa_en.stm and http://www.fao.org/infoods/tables_africa_fr.stm) as PDF and Excel file. It includes 472 foods and 28 components.
Particularly good because data is provided for different, named varieties, for at least some crops. Here’s a screengrab of part of some of the entries for pearl millet, just to give you an idea:
And yes, in case you were wondering, those ikmv and ikmp numbers refer to genebank accessions, as it happens mainly at ICRISAT and USDA. Just insert “ikmp” in the little box at the top right hand corner of Genesys, for example.
Now, who’s going to send these data to USDA and ICRISAT for them to include in their databases? Wait a minute… Why is everybody looking at me?
Where do Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla come from?
Late blight resistant potato varieties don’t just come from Hungary, for use in Europe. They’re also increasingly important back in potato’s homeland, Peru. The CGIAR Consortium had a short story a couple of days back about Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla, two late blight resistant clones that CIP has been developing in collaboration with 200 Andean families in an area where an outbreak in 2003 devastated the harvest, the first time that has happened at such high altitude. But hopefully now the last, at least for a while, because of these new varieties. I wanted to know if material from countries other than Peru was involved in this work, but a glitch in CIP’s online database doesn’t make it easy to check that. Although you do get a pedigree for each variety, when you click on the ancestors you mainly get an error, which just means that particular clone is not conserved. You’d have to search for the family from which that clone came to trace back the full ancestry of each variety (by cutting off the digits after the decimal point in the accession number), which would be interesting to do, no doubt, but too laborious for me just now in my fragile, jetlagged state. Maybe the CIP informatics unit will look into it? I’ll let you know if they do.
Agrobiodiversity in ice-cream
Nibbles: Farmer Assisted Natural Regeneration, Fungal apocalypse, Fertilizer platitudes, Sahel Restoration, Forest Restoration, Innovation, Phosphate bioavailability, Katniss, Ecoagriculture, Intensification
- Bunch of presentations from ICRAF’s #BeatingFamine shindig in Nairobi online.
- Humungous fungus threat.
- Fertilizers good for yields. Say what?
- A study on land restoration in Burkina Faso. Just in time.
- Speaking of restoration, chocolate can restore tropical forests. Universal panacea, obviously.
- Farming First welcomes the World Bank’s guide to investing in agricultural innovation systems. Buy low, sell high?
- A Cisgenic Approach for Improving the Bioavailability of Phosphate in the Barley Grain. That’ll please the folks who are scared of transgenics.
- I’ve missed out on the whole Hunger Games thing, but I have grown Katniss. I called it wapato.
- Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture creates a Department of Ecoagriculture. Sign of the times?
- New dossier from Spore, on sustainable intensification. No time to digest it yet.