You think they’re discussing this sort of thing at the “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health” conference? You think they’re also discussing dietary diversity?
The Concrete Corn Field
This picture contains more layers of meaning than you can possibly imagine. Nicola Twilley unpacks some of them at GOOD. Has she left any out?
Documentary on rice and climate change goes online
It’s a bit apocalyptic in tone, but it’s always good to see a genebank featured (starting at about 7:00 minutes in) in a popular documentary, in this case IRRI’s. But there’s much more, so watch the whole thing. Well done, Ruaraidh. And thanks, History Channel.
Nibbles: Barley, Fellowship, Supplier, Malnutrition, choices, Rice and climate change
- “[A]n ancient barley grain”. Just the one. One only. From Neolithic England.
- Crawford Fund Fellowship “for an agricultural scientist from a selected group of developing countries whose work has shown significant potential”.
- New World Seeds & Tubers, a supplier thereof.
- Alternative remedies for late potato blight.
- Mild underweight a better indicator of childhood malnutrition than severe. Press release and paper.
- “Food or the environment? Mixed signals confuse farmers.” There has to be a choice?
- Indonesia sorts out its rice-adapted-to-climate-change problem.
Saying goodbye to a maverick
The distinguished agricultural journalist Tom Hargrove died a few days ago. A contributor to a closed mailing list noted that he had made “a stellar scientific contribution to the CGIAR” in particular, though his renown went far beyond that. Very true. All the more so as he was one of the first to question the wisdom “of growing genetically uniform varieties over millions of hectares…from within the ‘lions den’ where the dogma was gospel.” Perhaps his greatest legacy is that the dogma is not as entrenched as it was.