CTA’s seminar to identify ways of improving access to climate change information for agriculture and rural development in ACP countries is off and running in Ouagadougou. There’s a blog to help you follow the proceedings. Agrobiodiversity is not explicitly listed as a theme, but I suspect it will come up.
Nibbles: Creole cooking, Cattle, Greenhouses, Cartograms
- Seychelles’ “living botanical herbarium of Creole Culture.”
- Kerala tries to save Vechur cattle.
- Terra Madre day 3: Tom ♥ Vandana.
- Pix of how intelligent greenhouses can be used to grow huge vegetables. I wonder if these technique can be applied to regenerating accessions in genebanks
- Don’t you just love cartograms?
Nibbles: Funding, Cow Gods, Ãœber Bee, Rice, Bushmeat, Oaks
- $50 million for climate change. Must be some for agricultural biodiversity. Via, which has the application forms.
- How the Egyptians came to venerate cattle.
- Building a better bee.
- Official US rice harvest forecasts 20% too high. Chinese comment: “Without rice, even the cleverest housewife cannot cook.”
- How about without bushmeat?
- IUCN lists endangered oaks. Know any ex situ collections? Tell IUCN!
Nibbles: Heirlooms, Seed, Ethnic cuisine, Meat, Sheep
- “The ‘Heirloom Tomato Salad’ was made with a mix of Sweet 100 and Sungold tomatoes — both of which are hybrid varieties.”
- FARMER’S NOTEBOOK: The importance of preserving native seed varieties.
- Increasing culinary diversity in the US.
- Eat a kangaroo and save the planet. No? How about moose then? You can have too much culinary diversity, perhaps.
- Climate change: the silver lining.
Disappearing wild potatoes mined for drought tolerance
An article in National Geographic looks at possible changes in the climate of the Andes, how they will affect potatoes, and what breeders are doing about it. The wild relatives are very much to the fore:
“The crosses we are developing between wild, drought-tolerant varieties and modern potatoes now are for the future,” said Meredith Bonierbale, senior potato breeder at the International Potato Center in Lima.
The article also quotes our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis, ((Andy works for CIAT and Bioversity in Cali, Colombia.)) who recently collaborated with others on a paper which concluded that some of those very same wild relatives are themselves threatened:
“Even if we halt habitat loss, in the next 50 years, climate change could undo all of the conservation that we already have,” said Jarvis.