Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Cary Fowler suggests a novel approach to developing policies for access and benefit sharing:
Rather than start with the policies we may instinctively love and want, this pedigree shows us that we should begin with what we want to achieve, such as flood-tolerant rice, work backwards from there, and ask ourselves what policies will be needed to achieve such this rice, or UG99-resistant wheat, or low-toxin lathyrus, or…
DFID’s Research Into Use Programme has just come up with a crop of policy briefs on agriculture, forestry and fisheries. Several of them have agrobiodiversity relevance, if not themes.
Browsing RIU’s publications list, I was also struck by its Lessons from Pro-Poor Seed Systems in East Africa and Lessons from Plant Breeder and Farmer Partnerships.
Hot on the heels of of the illustrated Arabic botanical treatise I pointed to a few days ago comes a wonderful online exhibition about food, cooking and eating in medieval times from the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Some great pictures of agrobiodiversity: crops and livestock, and their methods of preparation and presentation at the table. Via.
Don’t despair if you haven’t much room — you can still get produce from plants grown in old tins and tubs on window sills or balconies.
That’s Faustino Reyes Matute from San Marcos, Honduras. Only one of the many subsistence farmers that are providing advice to allotment owners and others would-be farmers in Britain, people “who have turned to growing their own fruit and veg as the nation tightens its purse strings in the recession.” The Catholic charity Progressio is behind the great idea.
