Commodity

Nibbles: AVRDC, PPB, Local foods, Emergency food, AnGR meeting, Tilapia, Agave, Asses, New cassava, Diversity for services, Climate change and phenology

40 years of AVRDC celebrated. Lots more stuff on vegetables below, so stick around if that grabbed you.
Breeding with farmers, an ICARDA manual. Are there any examples with vegetables, I wonder?
Let’s Go Local! See the ABC piece before it disappears from the front page. But it’s not just karat bananas that you need, of course.
Going local in Philippines too. And India for that matter. And, ahem, Arkansas. Oh and Amazonia.
Another use for baobab. I feel a factsheet coming on.
And here are some utterly different fruits.
Talking AnGR in Latin America.
GIFT tilapia in India! Look it up, we did a Brainfood on it.
A Belgian milestone. Put out more flags.
Is it Cinco de Mayo yet? Well, break out the tequila anyway.
Is it World Donkey Day yet?
“Farmer associations hope TME 419 will soon spread across the whole country.” That would be a fancy new cassava in DRC. Anybody worried about that at all?
Plant diversity key to zzzzzzzzzz…
Well this will wake you up.

The CGIAR Consortium finds a CGIAR success story. While the Guardian does another.
Talk on honeybee diversity at UC Davis. Hopefully Robert will be available for comment. Meanwhile, across the Pond…
Seeing the food security for the trees.
Yeah I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea to name a new avocado variety Uzi, no matter how good it may be.
Deconstructing the global land rush. And here’s the data… Jatropha everywhere.
The deep roots of globalization. Move over jatropha.
More on that paper on how to recognize a relatively drought-tolerant species.
All tangled up in natural fibres.
How to read organic agriculture debates. Just in case you actually want to read them.
An Indian prepares for the Convention on Biological Diversity‘s meeting in Hyderabad in October. Not too early, is it?
Bean breeders! Funding alert! You have nothing to lose but your diversity.
India posts world record rice harvest — using System of Rice Intensification. Take that, doubters.

Transgenic American Chestnuts on trial, as it were.
1st International Symposium on Jackfruit and other Moraceae to take place 31 August-2 September. Don’t expect access to the papers if you can’t be there. h/t CFF.
Breadfruit better than DEET at deterring mosquitoes. Tastier too.
Crawford Fund opening up opportunities for coconut oil producers.
History of the potato among the Basques. Well, why not?
Microkhan disembowels the rat-meat trade of Mozambique.

On farm conservation; Bioversity is really good at it. (And I sometimes make a linking mistake; mea maxima culpa.)
Economics of plant genetic resource management for adaptation to climate change. What’s the bottom line? No idea.
Something else Bioversity is really good at: newsletters.
Using GIS to help communities map vegetable production and marketing in Bangkok. I like the acronym: V-GIS.
The variety of non-chile peppers.
Older fruits better. Quentin Crisp unavailable for comment.

Bunch of presentations from ICRAF’s #BeatingFamine shindig in Nairobi online.
Humungous fungus threat.
Fertilizers good for yields. Say what?
A study on land restoration in Burkina Faso. Just in time.
Speaking of restoration, chocolate can restore tropical forests. Universal panacea, obviously.
Farming First welcomes the World Bank’s guide to investing in agricultural innovation systems. Buy low, sell high?
A Cisgenic Approach for Improving the Bioavailability of Phosphate in the Barley Grain. That’ll please the folks who are scared of transgenics.
I’ve missed out on the whole Hunger Games thing, but I have grown Katniss. I called it wapato.
Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture creates a Department of Ecoagriculture. Sign of the times?
New dossier from Spore, on sustainable intensification. No time to digest it yet.