Commodity

Nibbles: Ukraine genebank, Inequality, Olive breeding, Colorado apples, Indian rice diversity, Edible trees, Australian Grains Genebank

Spanish-language article about the effort to save Ukraine’s genebank.
Report on “Reducing inequalities for food security and nutrition” from the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). They don’t say so explicitly, but genebanks can help with that.
They can certainly help with breeding new olive varieties, which are much needed.
Genebanks come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes an apple orchard is also a genebank.
Sometimes rice farmers are genebanks.
I wonder how many genebanks conserve trees with edible leaves. This book doesn’t say, alas.
The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) gets a boost. No word on whether it will start conserving edible trees.

You want agroecology? Don’t neglect labour issues.
You can’t neglect hot dry winds if you want the breed wheat for Kansas these days.
IFPRI continues to ride the latest neglected crops bandwagon, this time in Latin America.
In Africa, beer may rescue fonio from neglect.
Rescuing plants from herbarium sheets.
Rescuing herbarium sheets in Ukraine.
Breeding a safe grasspea will definitely save it from neglect.
Meanwhile, in Rome, negotiations to enhance the Plant Treaty’s multilateral system of access and benefit sharing re-start. I bet a whole bunch of neglected crops are on the agenda.

Marketing the milpa.
Marketing a traditional Cretan olive variety.
Finding lost apples in New England. Now to market them.
Taking new passion fruit varieties to market in Australia.
Deconstructing Moche history, society and culture through compost and struggle meals. No sign of markets.
Reviewing the state of agroecology in Africa. Does “economic diversification” count as marketing?
The Global Tree Knowledge Platform must have stuff on marketing somewhere.
The books series ISSUES IN AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY, now free to download, has lots on marketing.

It’s pretty rare to have a mainstream media piece on the use of crop wild relatives for climate change adaptation but here we have an example with tomato, so make the most of it. There’s an interesting wrinkle though, so more to come, time permitting.
It’s even rarer to see a mainstream media piece on genebank staff getting trained. What’s going on out there?
Not exactly mainstream media, but how many times have you seen an official government press release on its livestock censuses? Anyway, India’s last one was carried out in 2019 and covered 184 breeds of 16 species. Wonder where the data is.
Speaking of government press releases, here’s one from USDA announcing that it has joined a coffee breeding network. Well, I for one think it’s important.
And staying in the USA, you know how you read in mainstream textbooks that Native Americans got horses from retreating Spanish colonists after the Pueblo Revolt? And you know how Native Americans have been saying that’s not what they think happened? How rare is it that a scientific paper involving Indigenous authors overturns a mainstream historical narrative and is splashed all over the mainstream media? Very rare, that’s how rare.

Gastropod episode on The Fruit that Could Save the World. Any guesses what that might be?
Atlas Obscura podcast on an apparently now famous wild-harvested chocolate from Bolivia. But how wild is it really?
BBC podcast on cacao for balance.
Forbes touts an African cassava revolution. What, no podcast?
Very interesting piece from the ever reliable Modern Farmer on how a small seed company called Fedco Seeds designated a bunch of maize landraces as “indigenously stewarded,” and are paying 10% of what they make from the sale of their seeds to a pooled Indigenous fund which goes to support a local, multi-tribal project called Nibezun. A sort of mini-MLS? Definitely worth a podcast. Any takers?
A long but rewarding article in New Lines Magazine describes medieval cookbooks from the Abbasid caliphate. The recipes make up for the somewhat stilted podcast.
BGCI publication on how the Morton Arboretum works out whether it should be growing a particular population or species of tree. The trick is to quantify 5 types of “value”: environmental, evolutionary, genetic diversity, horticultural, conservation. Though one could also consider hostorical/cultural, educational and economic value as well. I suspect in the end it comes down to whether it looks nice in an available gap. If I were to do a podcast on this, I’d test it out with the tree in the first of these Nibbles.