- Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus spread by human activity related to agriculture.
- UN food security expert says “75 per cent of agro-biodiversity has been lost”. Naughty.
- UC Davis to lead big USAID-funded international horticulture development project.
- Botany Photo of the Day: Vitis labrusca.
- “The connection between a convolvulaceous tuber bearing crop, a folk-blues artist and a cetacean…”
- IWMI maps drought. Globally.
In which our blogger decides not to quibble about the One Acre Fund
The philosophy behind the One Acre Fund is clearly of a piece with that of the Millennium Villages and the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme: giving farmers seeds, fertilizers, some advice and a market outlet will do wonders for livelihoods. In a way, it’s a no-brainer: of course it will! And it seems churlish and petty and ungenerous to add the canonical “at least for a while” qualifier, and bring up sustainability and resilience and suchlike when lives are at stake, the need urgent, and the amounts of money involved relatively small. So I won’t go down that route. But I will point out, and not for the first time, that if you are going to do something like this, or this, please first have a look at the amount and uniqueness of the agrobiodiversity you may end up displacing. And I’ll also repeat, again not for the first time, that such initiatives are why we need a global early warning system for genetic erosion. It’s easy to start. All we need is a participatory online mapping platform. You can even submit data via SMS these days!
Helping the guarango
And here’s another nice agrobiodiversity video, though not part of the contest Jeremy refers to in the previous post. It’s about the guarango (Prosopis pallida) tree of the Peruvian coast. Once central to pre-Columbian culture for its pods, wood and ecosystem services, it is now “near extinction in the Ica-Nasca region.” But it’s not going down without a fight, and it is getting some help, for example from a Kew reforestation project. Thanks, Charlotte.
A Commission meets
All go at FAO again with the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture holding its 12th meeting. One of the things on the agenda is consideration of the 2nd report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the final version is available online as a large pdf). There’s also a side event on crop wild relatives, among others. IISD has the low-down every day.
Nibble: Wild apples, Genetic erosion, Bananas, Cow DNA, Honeybee virus survey, Women and traditional agriculture
- BBC slideshow on the wild apples of Khazakhstan.
- Malawi breeder decries genetic erosion.
- Bananas good for food security in central Africa. Well, yes.
- The ruminant family tree deconstructed.
- Public to help researchers locate wild honeybee colonies in Hawaii.
- “No Pesticides No Foreign Drinks.”