- Wild cotton use lands prize for boffin trio.
- Unesco to protect wild Citrus in India. And read the discussion.
- IV International Symposium on Fig.
- Permaculture: The Podcast.
- The NY Times thinks Americans should eat fewer turtles. And drink more South African wine.
- Meanwile, the WSJ gets into single-source chocolate.
- Nice map of freshwater fish diversity. But will it last? WWF has a plan.
Nibbles: Training, Teapot, Onion
- Food and Nutrition Security training course starts 30 March 2009. Is biodiversity involved?
- Giant teapot made of coconut shell wins national record.
- Giant database made of food items claims world record. Via.
- Heroes of Horticulture exhibit interrupts US Inauguration. Jeremy comments: “Yay!”
Gorge yourself on chocolate…videos
The great How Stuff Works website has a whole series of videos on how to make chocolate. If only the World Cacao Federation had got in touch with them!
Bananas on the radio
Voice of America has five (count them!) articles and podcasts on the banana in Africa. Going to take me a while to get through the whole lot, but I’ll try to post a summary when I do.
Cacao goes sustainable, yes, but how?
The World Cocoa Foundation is offering a guide to the cocoa industry on sustainability principles that focus on equitable profit, labour standards and environmental issues.
That’s from a press release. There’s something similar on the World Cocoa Foundations’s blog. But I can’t find anywhere on the WCF website the teach-yourself-sustainable-cacao-farming document that I was foolishly expecting.
I guess we’ll have to make do with some general aims:
The sustainability initiative commits the foundation and its members to working toward three categories; profit, people and planet.
For the people category, the aim is for healthy and thriving cocoa-farming communities, where international labour standards are followed and farming practices are safe.
The planet category refers to responsible, sound environmental stewardship in cocoa-farming communities where soil and water are conserved and Integrated Pest Management to limit the use of agricultural chemicals, protecting the fragile tropical ecosystem.
And in terms of profit, the aim is to improve equitable economic returns for farmers built upon expanding entrepreneurial skills, stronger and more effective farmer associations, and more productive, profitable farming practices.
and a bunch of example projects. Not much about the importance of genetic diversity, alas.