Luigi Guarino

March 19, 2009March 21, 2009

Rock salt and pond scum

A fascinating post over at Rancho Gordo discusses tequesquite. That’s a natural salt that has been used in Mexican cooking since pre-Columbian times, including for nixtamalization, a process that makes maize easier to process, tastier and more nutritious.

The post also mentions the alga known as tecuilayl (Spirulina geitleri). This was apparently an important food for the Aztecs. ((Alas, it doesn’t make it into FAO’s guide to the seaweed industry.)) Our resident expert on Mexico says it’s the perfect complement to a succulent steamed axolotl in chile sauce. Yummie.

March 19, 2009March 19, 2009

Nibbles: Community forestry, Fresh water, Salinity, Seed systems, Acacia, Iron, Cambodia

Community forestry not making enough money in Namibia. Yeah, but who is?
Southern African freshwater bodies in trouble. Gotta be some worried rice wild relatives out there.
Salinity increasing in Bangladesh. That can’t be good.
Let the people have seeds of local varieties!
Australian takes acacias to Niger, coals to Newcastle.
Breeding rice for tolerance to high Fe in West Africa.
“One of the most abundant sources of fish in Asia, the lake feeds a hungry nation.”

March 19, 2009March 19, 2009

Bhutan agricultural statistics go online

Yes, that’s what the news item said, and it got me all excited. So I rushed off to SINGER first to see if there’s any germplasm from that country in the international collections, and if any of that was geo-referenced. And I was happy to find some 30 barleys at ICARDA, strung all along the main road, from east to west.

And so then I went off to CountrySTAT-Bhutan to see how well this material covered the distribution of the crop. The results were a little weird. This is the distribution of barley cultivation in Bhutan in 2005.

As you can see, the crop is concentrated in the west of the country, whereas in 1981, when the ICARDA collection was made, that seemed not to be the case. Ok, things change. The oldest data in CountrySTAT-Bhutan is 1999, but the pattern is the same.

Has the distribution of barley in Bhutan really changed so drastically in the past 30 years or so? And if so, what has that done to genetic diversity? Have the landraces formerly found in the east migrated, or are they only to be found in genebanks now?

March 18, 2009

Maize abandoned

Maize farmers turning to sorghum in Swaziland and to cassava in Kenya. Is it climate change beginning to bite?

March 18, 2009

Water, water everywhere

A couple of fun stories about the historical dimension of the exploitation of aquatic biodiversity from Britain’s Daily Mail this morning. First, how Google Earth revealed a thousand-year-old fish trap off the coast of Wales. And second, how the reintroduction of the beaver, absent since it was hunted to extinction in the 16th century, could reduce water bills.