A very warm welcome back to Rebsie Fairholm, the best singing backyard breeder of all time, I reckon. I’m looking forward once again to the vicarious thrill of following her adventures in pea breeding, among much else.
Nibbles: ICUC as was, Rice in Africa, Gardens, Botanical news, Durian, Fish and climate change, Nutrition in India video, Viruses in sweet potatoes, CBD, Wild tomatoes, Forst-tolerant apricots
- Change at the helm at Crops for the Future. Best wishes to all concerned.
- African Rice Congress wraps up. Successfully, no doubt.
- Tell you Sacred Garden story. Go on then…
- Nigel Chaffey rounds up botanical news. The best of the kind, for my money.
- The art of eating durian.
- Bye, and thanks for the fish.
- DFID on undernutrition in India. Very short on specifics. Where’s the varied diets stuff?
- Gotta virus clean those heirloom sweet potatoes.
- Latest from CBD ABS negotiations in Cali. Anybody there want to give us the scoop?
- Endemic wild tomato relatives from Atacama Desert… I dunno…investigated I guess.
- Russian boffin grows apricots in Siberia.
Tackling vitamin A deficiency in Africa one crop at the time
What with high beta carotene sweet potatoes on one side and maize on the other, there will soon be no excuse for anyone in Africa to have vitamin A deficiency. We’ve blogged about this before. Often. The question remains: is it better to push these orange varieties of the staples, or promote diverse diets? Or, indeed, do both.
FAO water boffins forget breeding
FAO has a very slick slide show on the relationship between water, agriculture, food security and poverty. I guess it’s because of World Water Day. But why no mention of crop improvement through breeding? More efficient irrigation is not going to solve this problem on its own, surely.
The microbe commons in the spotlight
The International Journal of the Commons, a new one on me, has a special issue on microbes. Actually, not just microbes. The idea seems to be to compare and contrast what is happening in microbial genetic resources with the access and benefit sharing and IPR regimes which are in force for other bits of biodiversity. There’s even an interesting paper entitled “Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration,” by Byerlee and Dubin. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, is a member of the editorial board of the journal.