- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?
A market in agrobiodiversity conservation credits?
So apparently Caroline Spelman, the new UK Secretary of State for environment, food and rural affairs, will be considering “a new system of conservation credits to protect habitats,” in line with a manifesto promise.
Under the scheme proposed in the manifesto, any property development that results in biodiversity loss must compensate for that loss by an equal investment in biodiversity and habitat conservation or restoration elsewhere.
Or so says a generally favourable commentary in The Guardian by Ben Caldecott, head of UK & EU climate change and energy policy at Climate Change Capital (CCC), who actually thinks the whole thing should go global. Worth a try, why not? But will the scheme include agrobiodiversity? If the said property development, or whatever, resulted in loss of genetic diversity in crop landraces or local livestock breeds, would it likewise be brought to book? It would be nice, though perhaps naive, to think that it would.
Spatially explicit conservation
The May 2010 Diversity and Distributions is a special issue on “Conservation biogeography — foundations, concepts and challenges.” I haven’t had a chance to go through it all, but there are very interesting-looking contributions on how to improve niche model, the role of citizen science and the biogeography of climate change. More when I actually read a couple of the papers.
Nibbles: African success, Tef biotech, Hybrid rice, Livestock data, Wine grapes, Uphoff on SRI, Blog Carnival
- There are some African success stories, and a few even have to do with agriculture.
- TILLING tef.
- Some farmers’ groups in Asia don’t like hybrid rice. But some do, presumably. How come we never hear from those?
- Livestock trends deconstructed.
- The mother of all grapevine varieties found. Well, some varieties anyway.
- One of the foremost supporters of the System of Rice Intensification interviewed.
- Scientia Pro Publica, latest edition. There’s some nutrition stuff.
Lots of seeds going to Haiti
First Monsanto donates hybrid seeds to Haiti. So then the Hudson Valley Seed Library says I see that and raise you some open-pollinated varieties. What I want to know is if someone will be monitoring the results.
LATER: Maybe there wont be much to monitor after all.