Luigi Guarino

January 29, 2011January 28, 2011

Agrobiodiversity conservation going mainstream?

I don’t know about you, but I’m surprised when, on the same day mind you, the Costa Rica News has a piece about a new citrus genebank at CATIE and Balkans.com an article about the genetic relationship between Turkish and Hungarian apricot cultivars. Pleasantly surprised.

January 28, 2011January 28, 2011

Livestock genetic resources meetings galore

The livestock genetic resources conservation people are going to be hard at it both in Europe and India this year. Must be something in the air.

January 27, 2011

Colombian agrobiodiversity on display

Colombian Fruit Odyssey

Originally uploaded by KitchenCaravan

January 22, 2011

Thousand year old spring roll

Spring Roll

Originally uploaded by Penn Museum

January 21, 2011

Bats going bananas

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.

Fresh Nibbles

A North Macedonian professor’s 15-year rescue mission for landraces and crops surviving only in remote villages. Why bother? Stay tuned…
Ancient grapevines in Tigray represent a unique genetic lineage with potential value for breeding varieties adapted to dryland conditions.
Hawai’i Public Radio checks in on Maui’s coconut genebank. Useful to breed varieties adapted to really wet conditions, presumably.
The Cayman Islands are also hoarding coconuts, along with lots of tasty fruits.
A USD 400,000 boost from Taiwan for the Eswatini national genebank. Indigenous vegetables get much-needed love.
A regional survey of 25 orphan crops across 13 Latin American countries finds quinoa and amaranth well-catalogued, but characterization budgets are the real bottleneck. Collecting and conserving in genebanks is great, but not enough.
South Korea puts 330,000 seed accessions under “double lock”, hedging against both climate change and war. Conserving in one place is not enough.
FAO warns that nearly a third of the world can’t afford the USD 4.28 a day that a healthy diet costs — nearly three billion people, and rising. That’s why we need al the above, I guess.

Published on July 28, 2026