- A big-deal wheat rust conference started today at ICARDA in Aleppo, and there are various webby ways to keep in touch, like RSS (pointless?) and Twitter.
- Stop Press: Wheat rust presentations now on SlideShare.
- A windmill in south London. Jeremy says, “I hope it grinds slow, but exceeding fine.”
- Cassava!
UG99 resistant varieties
In case you’re not following the discussion here on knowledge management, here’s a map of the wheat varieties resistant to UG99.
If you use Google to search for images of “UG99 resistance” it is right up there, near the top, and several versions are available…
Biofortified foods rolled out across Latin America and the Caribbean
Agro-Salud, “a multi-partner ‘biofortification’ program,” has announced on the CIAT blog that it is releasing new varieties of rice, maize and beans to poor communities in Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras and Nicaragua. The new crops are described as “nutritionally enhanced” and also “out-perform traditional crops in terms of disease resistance and yields”.
The new varieties add to more than 40 nutritionally-improved crops that Agro Salud and its partners have released across the region since 2007.
I wonder if they have had any impact on nutrition?
Nibbles: Yemen, Squabs, Chilies, Questions, Impact Assessment, Huckleberry, Cacao, Filipino rice genebank
- Yemen saves local varieties, adapts local agriculture.
- Not all small livestock enterprises guarantee success. Beware.
- Hot new book: Chasing Chilies.
- Another list of really important questions. Answers? Can’t get the original, yet.
- New World Bank blog on impact assessment. Assess this.
- In the market for huckleberry market information?
- CocoaLink off the ground. Maybe not in Cote d’Ivoire yet, though, alas.
- PhilRice genebank in the Philnews.
FAO says crop wild relatives must be collected
Plant genetic material stored in gene banks should be screened with future requirements in mind. Additional plant genetic resources — including those from wild relatives of food crops — must be collected and studied because of the risk that they may disappear.
Climate-adapted crops — for example varieties of major cereals that are resistant to heat, drought, submergence and salty water — can be bred. FAO stressed however that this should be done in ways that respect breeders’ and farmers’ rights, in accordance with the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources.
That’s from FAO’s a submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change about a week ago. Can’t think how I missed it. Of course, there is some collecting work being planned now on crop wild relatives…