Commodity

Nibbles: Indian millets, Indian rice, Neolithic bread, Andean potatoes, UAE genebank, Niger onions, Lentil domestication, Italian rice, Sea cucumber

The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.

Public sector plant breeders are disappearing.
The Millet Man of India is still there though. And why he’s important.
A museum to public sector breeder Nazareno Strampelli appears in Italy.
Another couple of community genebanks appear in Ghana.
We can never have too many discussions on the importance of genebanks, so here’s another one. Not much on the community sort, though. Here’s another example: Ireland. Even the Arab States of Asia want one!
And a deep dive on crop wild relatives in genebanks to round things off.
A community saves illegal potatoes in Canada. Yeah, I know, there’s a lot to unpack there.
Maybe that humble illegal potato needs a geographic indication, like that superfood, açaí.
The Mayocoba bean as a superfood is a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of other pulses out there making waves.
The Michigan State kiwi could probably do with a geographic indication too, come to think of it. Cold-hardy and smooth-skinned? Super!
Ok, this is probably the last Nibbles before Christmas, so let’s celebrate with a drink: with bitters of course.

China announces a slew of seed-related measures.
A slew of seeds kept apples diverse in the US South, but not so much any more.
Fortunately there’s a slew of apples, among many other things, in the USDA genebank system.
Dates too, probably, but this article is actually about the (complementary?) collection at Arizona State University.
A slew of intellectual protections has been good for seed companies. But consumers?
IFG no doubts benefits mightily from intellectual property protection of its grape varieties. The diversity of which you can peruse on this nice website.
Speaking of nice websites, this one helps farmers pick-a-mix of crops. Intercropping is diversity too.
How the coffee industry is trying to cope with a slew of sustainability rules. Yeah, sometimes IP protection is not enough.
But who owns heritage varieties?
Including heritage varieties of Belgian malting barley and other cereals.
Speaking of malting, they use sorghum in Tanzania.
It’s unclear what heritage varieties went into making horse-bread, but I’d like to taste the stuff.
But who needs bread (or beer?) anyway? There’s a slew of root and tuber crops in Africa and elsewhere just waiting to solve hunger…
…as Guyana knows well.
Wanna keep track of (most of) the above? FAO has you (sorta) covered via a slew of indicators.

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.