- Not totally wild genes protect wheat from Ug99.
- Not really wild Texas Wild tomato brings Texan back to gardening. These in Peru are wild though.
- Speaking of gardening, here’s Michael Pollan on his struggles with opium.
- Wild, healthy fruit flavours becoming more popular on the soft drink market, but not clear to what extent they will come from actual plants, wild or otherwise. You know, plants with yield variation and other inconveniences. Plants that some people rely on for nutrition, by the way.
- Descriptors for quinoa, including the wild species. And more, much more.
- I wonder if there are descriptors for wild yaks.
- New UK facility for phenotyping plants, including wild ones, I’m sure.
- And if those wild UK plants are trees, you can use this app to identify them, before phenotyping them. Assuming you can dig them up and squeeze them into the new facility. Anyway, maybe one of them will be European Tree of the Year.
- Of course, if you wanted access to the genetic resources of such trees, you’d have to deal with the Nagoya Protocol, which the EU is getting to grips with, don’t worry.
- Not many C4 species among UK trees, I guess.
- Teff is C4, but that isn’t stopping people trying to replace it with barley in injira.
- Next thing you know the Chinese will be swapping tea for coffee. No, wait.
Nibbles: Potato diversity sites, Potato market, Smallholders and markets, CIP genebank, African potato meet, Japanese fries & eels, Micronutrients, Pickling book
- Setting up a network of high potato diversity sites for in situ conservation. It has a Facebook page, so “Like” it.
- Some of that diversity will no doubt find its way to Lima’s markets.
- If not, Leaping and Learning will tell you how. And why.
- There’s a lot of diversity in genebanks too, of course. And thank goodness for that!
- Potatoes are important in Africa too.
- And Japan. But do they go with eels?
- What are potatoes like for micronutrients? Probably better than you think. But could be better?
- If not, you can always pickle them. Can’t you?
Where exactly is that zeitgeist?
Something is up, Jeremy said a couple of days ago, by way of introduction to a pair of pieces which he suggested, tongue no doubt at least partly in cheek, showed “the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change.”
Well, if something was up, it is now firmly down, and as for the zeitgeist, its name is biotech. Because yesterday some of the masterminds behind GM won the World Food Prize. And, probably not coincidentally, the Rt Hon Owen Paterson, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, gave a speech to Rothamsted Research which ended with this rousing call:
GM isn’t necessarily about making life easier for farmers or making their businesses more profitable, although I believe that there are great opportunities for the industry. It’s about finding non-chemical solutions to pests and diseases. It’s about fortifying food with vitamin A so that children in the poorest countries don’t go blind or die. It’s about making crops durable enough to survive sustained drought. It’s about developing new medicines. It’s about feeding families in some of the poorest parts of the world. We cannot expect to feed tomorrow’s population with yesterday’s agriculture. We have to use every tool at our disposal.
Meanwhile, the search for that elusive middle ground, in which every tool at our disposal is not only used, but gets an equal chance to be honed and oiled, continues.
LATER: How would you facilitate a truly constructive debate about that middle ground? Here’s how NOT to do it:
Setting up a debate that is framed around risk, rather than food politics, focused on a single subset of technology, rather than one that explores all the options, structured around science in an area where questions about outcomes are impossible to answer with certainty, about a technology that has unclear benefits to the public and the developing world but very obvious benefits to large firms that the public distrusts (partly because of their unclear relationships to politicians), seems to me at least like a waste of taxpayers’ money.
World Food Prize announcement today
Our Laureate Announcement Ceremony is THIS Wednesday, June 19, at 12:30pm EDT! The event will be live via webcast at http://t.co/bhCgXIpB5Q
— World Food Prize Foundation (@WorldFoodPrize) June 17, 2013
Who will it be, who will it be, who will it be, who will it be, who will it be? Find out in one hour!
Nibbles: Indigenous conservation, Rice and conservation, Amazon medicines, Organic products, Sustainable oysters, Cherfas at Seed Savers, Calestous Juma, Cassava website, Israeli agritech, Fragaria breeding, Catacol whitebeam, Weather sensors, FAO Commission & Conference, Amartya Sen
- A toolkit to help indigenous communities do conservation. Should they need one.
- On the other hand… Half of Japan’s endangered species hotspots are found in satoyama, which are under pressure. Compare and contrast with rice farming in Thailand.
- Learn all about some medicinal plants of the Amazon, minus their scientific names. Not including runa tea. Lots of other opportunities out there, though.
- Maybe even including oysters.
- Jeremy no doubt to feast on the mollusc after spilling the beans on the EU seed regulations at the Seed Savers jamboree.
- Wonder what Calestous Juma thinks of those regulations.
- But I bet he (and his father, who introduced the crop to his region of Kenya) would like this cassava website to rule them all.
- The Volcani Institute‘s gifts to the world…
- …probably include new strawberries, but not this one.
- Scientists straining, failing to find plant to meaningfully compare to the giant panda.
- Bioversity does up its iButtons.
- And gets a namecheck in a paean to the FAO Commission on GRFA on its 30th birthday. All this FAO stuff is because its Conference is on this week. I don’t suppose any of it will be more important than Amartya Sen’s speech.