As I always knew he would, Danny has posted his take on Terra Madre 2010 over at his blog. Bottom line: more focus needed. Good luck with that.
Nibbles: African food, Bitter potato
- Supporting African food traditions through research.
- And a South American food tradition illustrated.
Terra Madre 2010
Terra Madre 2010 is deep into its third day. I know some of our readers are there. That’s you I’m pointing at, Danny. Anyone want to give us an update?
Evaluating the Millennium Villages
We’ve shown our skepticism about the Millennium Villages here before, in particular their apparent disregard for the importance of agrobiodiversity. If I am honest, I would say that that on balance they are probably a good thing. They are certainly well-intentioned. And little else seems to have worked. But no matter how many evaluation reports I read, I suspect it is this snippet that will stay with me, quoted in a New Republic review of Peter Gill’s recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. Gill visits a…
…village called Koraro, chosen to be one of Sachs’s so-called Millennium Villages, which were meant as demonstration projects to prove that foreign aid can really work. He asks a local man whether he has ever met Sachs, to which the man replies, “I have met the owner twice”…
Following crop development in real time
The Global Agriculture Monitoring Project (GLAM), a joint NASA, USDA, UMD and SDSU initiative, has built a global agricultural monitoring system that provides the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) with timely, easily accessible, scientifically-validated remotely-sensed data and derived products as well as data analysis tools, for crop-condition monitoring and production assessment.
Great for deciding on the timing of germplasm collecting expeditions too, I would imagine.