- 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.”
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?
Maize abandoned
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.
Ghanaian women not ready for biofuels
“Destruction of economic trees such as shea-nut and dawadawa trees actually deny community members, especially women their source of livelihood. It also restricts the hitherto extensive traditional rearing of animals in the affected communities.”
Bad news alert, from AllAfrica.com.