I dunno. You got your FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which is right now winding up here in Rome for the 13th time (CGRFA 13). Then of course you got your International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which met a few months ago in Bali for the fourth time. Then you got your WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC), whose 19th session is meeting in Geneva about now too. Then you got your Convention on Biological Diversity with its Nagoya Protocol and whatnot. Maybe others too. I just hope somebody out there is in charge of keeping all this stuff straight. Don’t you?
Oh no, not another social network!
We’ve been playing around with Scoop.it. What do you think?
Nibbles: AnGR, Fruit trees, IBC18, Tree pollination, Solomon Islands and climate change, Octopus diversity, Seed saving
- Livestock diversity in the hands of FAO. No comment.
- Let them eat fruit!
- AoB breaks down International Botanical Congress 18 for us.
- Species-poor tree plantations could be good for conservation of rare tree found in remnant forest patches in Chile because they encourage pollinators to move on. Agriculture, on other hand, is bad because it lures generalist pollinators into staying. Nature, don’t you just love it?
- Climate-proofing the Solomon Islands to include “the isolation of crop species tolerant of high salinity, high rainfall, and drought.” Strewth.
- Marine diversity. (Only kidding.)
- Good advice on home seed saving from Suzanne Ashworth. She wrote the (a?) book.
Ollas Per Persson
Just a great photo from the Swedish National Heritage Board, taken ca 1944, that I found on Flickr’s Economic Botany Pool.
Unlocking agriculture’s past to feed the future world
That’s the title of a talk our friend and occasional contributor Jacob van Etten will give in the National Geographic store in Madrid next week, on the 28th to be precise. If you can’t be there in person, you can follow Jacob online. And if that doesn’t work, no doubt he’ll tell us here how it all went. I just hope he explains to National Geographic the difference between a potato and an oca. In fact, why not open with that, Jacob? That’ll grab their attention.