Many of our most important foods come from bat-dependent plants. These include bananas, plantain, breadfruit, peaches, mangos, dates, figs, cashews and many more.
Bananas? Bananas? Yes, bananas. Well, kinda.
An overlooked global public good
Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, is asking
donors to move away from the model of subsisidised fertilisers and seeds – which he calls “private goods”, to supporting “public goods” such as better infrastructure, strengthening local markets, ensuring access to credit and building storage capabilities.
Alas, I don’t think “storage capabilities” refers to genebanks here. No word on whether Prof. de Schutter would in fact include international crop germplasm collections in that list, but the World Bank certainly does.…
Uncontacted agrobiodiversity
Survival International has a new website on Uncontacted Tribes:
More than 100 tribes around the world reject contact with outsiders. This is their story.
Somewhat weirdly, the website includes a map, although it is pointed out that it “won’t help anyone make ‘first contact.’ But it will help to stop oil companies and loggers from invading the lands of uncontacted tribes.”
Be that as it may, I could not resist mashing it up in Google Earth 1 with the data in Genesys on the world’s holdings of agrobiodiversity. This is the result for an area comprising the Brazilian state of Rondonia and some surrounding regions.
Not surprisingly, there’s not much in the way of germplasm accessions from the general areas occupied by uncontacted tribes. Oil and logging companies may not be the only things that these tribes should be worried about.
Nibbles: Dog, Beer, Human Planet, Entomophagy, Food Atlas, Pepper, Barley
- When dog was on the menu.
- Going far, and far back, for beer. And indeed yeast. Always worth the effort.
- BBC launches Human Planet, focusing on “man’s remarkable relationship with the natural world.” Which apparently doesn’t include agriculture.
- Mexicans eat many moth species, and not just the larvae.
- Amazing interactive food atlas for the US. wish I had a use for it, but someone surely does.
- Breeding a “better” Jalapeño pepper — to hold more cheese, natcho.
- Food as politics; the tsampa-eaters of the TAR. h/t GOOD.
Nibbles: IK, Fragaria, Citrus, Millet breeding, Vitis, Agricultural biodiversity, Satellite imagery, Subsistence
- Indigenous knowledge of agrobiodiversity makes the news in Indonesia.
- Reconstructing the strawberry.
- And reconstructing the history of cultivated citrus fruits.
- ICRISAT millet breeders get an a new toy.
- Plenty of diversity in the cultivated grape still. And it’s going to need it.
- Biodiversity (and agrobiodiversity?) needed for farm productivity. Well I never! But more mixed results available too. What’s a poor boy to think?
- SPOT 5 imagery can be used to identify crops. In Texas. But in Tanzania?
- Agricultural biodiversity and subsistence traditions, Part 2. In the Ozarks. But in Omo? (And here’s Part 1.)