- Guardian has whole piece on the importance on Kew’s collections without once mentioning Millennium Seed Bank. Anyway, the Paris herbarium is not so bad either, though they are no match for the Kew press machine.
- Hybridization is good for plant diversity. Well, yeah. What am I missing here? Oh and here’s more about things that maintain variation, and more still. You see what I did there?
- Allanblackia is the next big thing in agroforestry. Which probably means its name will soon be changed.
- Conclave meets to discuss
election of next Popepulse productivity. - Videos from Africa GIS week.
- Meeting to review 10 years of research on chronic poverty. Must have been deeply depressing.
- Helping rice to keep its cool. A crop wild relatives story.
- “The Ministry of Science and Technology should emphasize the need to undertake research programmes on unexplored and underutilized crops as these could constitute the genetic base for genes for improved nutritional quality of foods.” In India, that is.
- “We need to mine that diversity to provide genetic material in an adapted background more readily to be used by plant breeders.” From CIMMYT. How many times have I heard that? Here’s my problem: who will do it?
- That IRIN feature from a few days ago recycled with a new pic. Which is of a genebank not included in the list in the text. The person shown is my friend Dr Jean Hanson, recently retired head of the ILRI genebank.
- DIY perennial cereals.
- “Biodiversity scientists and agricultural scientists have tended to approach their interests in very different ways. I think there’s a lot we can learn from each other.” Wait, what?
- Another best biodiversity blogs list. Ahem.
- A “very clear action plan” for a ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa emerges from AGRA meeting. You will however look in vain for the details on the scidev.net piece.
- The last Inka treasure. Yep, the potato.
- Boffins find anti-Striga gene. No, not really, settle down.
- Rachel Laudan is really rude about Mexican potatoes.
- Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto? Good question.
- Finding the 100-Horse Chestnut.
- Getting to grips with photoperiod sensitivity in maize.
Considering crop wild relatives anew
Our friend Andy Jarvis is suffering the pains of the Villa Bellagio on scuzzy Lake Como as his contribution to a rethinking of the role of crop wild relatives in adapting to climate change. You can read his impressions (and see the presentation he unleashed on an unsuspecting audience) at his team’s blog.
Bottom lines:
- Crop wild relatives are increasingly important.
- Crop wild relatives are increasingly usable, and hence increasingly in demand.
- Crop wild relatives are increasingly threatened.
Nibbles: Heirloom Auction, Flatulence, Trade, Swaziland, Turkey genome, Sorghum
- The Art of Farming: How to fund heirloom veggies, NYC black-tie style.
- Oregano to save the planet from bovine emissions.
- Kew blogs “strange articles of trade“, all examples of agricultural biodiversity. How about them worms?
- Swazi farmer breaks with grazing tradition to adapt to climate change.
- Another day, another DNA “sequence”. The turkey.
- Overselling popped sorghum? On YouTube.
Nibbles: Nagoya, Popghum, Pavlovsk, Water, Climate change, Plumpy’Nut, Buckwheat
- The essential guide to the 10th Conference of the Parties to the convention on Biological Diversity. Unmissable.
- Popghum? What genius came up with that name? And now that it’s big in Virginia, can Africa and Latin America be far behind?
- Jeremy Bentham excoriates the Russian Federation on Pavlovsk. And gets it mostly right. Yes, that Jeremy Bentham.
- Apparently water diversity is also a good thing for food security.
- Climate change! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Huh!
- “Plumpy’Nut is not a miracle cure for global hunger or for global malnutrition.” Say it isn’t so!
- Never mind wheat, here’s the great buckwheat panic of 2010, kasha chaos.
Nibbles: Bees, Genebanks, Livestock, Deforestation
- 17 years of data confirm fears of bee decline.
- Slideshow on Egyptian Deserts Genebank; prepare to be astounded.
- Slideshow on US National Plant Germplasm System; prepare to be even more astounded.
- Livestock and climate change, a background paper from ILRI.
- “Most new farmland comes from cutting tropical forest.” The good news: it’s corporate, so can be pressured to stop.