Breeding

Nibbles: Frances Seymour, She don’t lie, PNG coffee, Rony Swennen, Corridors, Eating bugs, Potato breeding

Former CIFOR DG interviewed about Global Forest Watch and more. I would have asked why you can’t import your own data or share a map you make.
A particularly important place to watch the forest is Honduras, because deforestation there is correlated with cocaine trafficking.
Not clear from this World Bank piece if deforestation in PNG associated with cultivation of another drug, i.e. coffee.
Better bananas would be good for forests, wouldn’t they?
Bah, just let them have corridors, they’ll be fine.
And don’t forget to eat the forest bugs.
Ok, I can’t figure out how to fit the history of potato breeding into this narrative. Any of it organic, though?

Brazil revises its National Biodiversity and Action Plan and wants to mainstream biodiversity and nutrition.
That’s a really old cheese.
Are you conducting projects testing how the presence of trees affects food production and natural resource management? CIFOR would like to hear from you.
ICRISAT super-chickpea takes over India.
And CIAT amylose-free starch cassava to take over Brazil. China next?
Red Stripe to use cassava. Jamaica? No, they really did want to make cassava beer. Well, come on, things are peachy with cassava bread, why not beer?

Jonathan Foley, @GlobalEcoGuy, lands well deserved award for his straight-talking on food issues.
I wonder what he’d say about C4 rice.
Not sure he’s ever written about fish, but he probably will.
Sustainable harvesting of Prunus africana maybe not so sustainable after all. Well, I guess that’s science.
Encomium to the recently-deceased “Father of Sorghum.”
Shame he missed the round-up on improving abiotic stress tolerance in crops, linked to by AoB Blog.
Wouldn’t it have been cool if the Father of Sorghum had met the Peanut Man?
Global production of 10 top commodities has increased 130% since 1960, population by 89%. Draw your own conclusions about world hunger and malnutrition.

Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
What the California drought means for food.
And the one in Brazil for coffee.
And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.

UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.