- Bird people say: Critical migratory waterbird sites need urgent protection. Tomato and potato crop wild relative people say: What, only the critical ones? You’re lucky, mate!
- Toffs everywhere start stocking up on caviar.
- Tequila and cheese geographically indicated. Foie gras says: Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
- Uganda Government minister says yams cause cancer. Oh, come now, steady on.
- Are Tomatoes Fruits or Vegetables? Asks mental_floss. Oh no, I’m not going there, says me.
- “…where there is a market, the Maya will work to develop supply capability; where there is no market, traditional subsistence methods are better than the introductions.”
- Building a better slash-and-burn agriculture.
- Nice Asian greens. I’m hungry already.
- Crop Composition Database gets facelift.
Grain and Cities
The wait is over. Rachel Laudan’s talk at Postopolis is now available in two versions. Rachel herself carries a transcript of her talk, with some photos. And Nicola over at Edible Geography has the same transcript with different photos and a bit more by way of introduction. ((And according to Nicola videos are in the offing too.))
There is so much content there that I hardly know what to say, except that I am in awe of the research skills and basic understanding of the problem. The basic point is that “without food energy, a city is nothing”. For most people and most of history, that energy came from grains: about a kilo per person per day. And the consequences of that … go read!
Nibbles: Grasscutters, Geographical indicators, GMO bananas, UK farming
- Neleshi Grasscutter and Farmers Association (NAGRAFA). Grasscutters are not members.
- The value of geographical indicators. So, where is that grasscutter from?
- Capsicum genes engineered into banana might protect against Xanthomonas wilt in the future, if safe. No need for management then, which works now.
- Interesting arguments for keeping Britain GM-free: profits and aesthetics of biodiverse agriculture.
Nibbles: Allium, Desertification and livestock, Striga, Emmer, Hawaii, Almond, Seeds at FAO, Cassava in central Africa, Seed sculpture, Biofortification, Millets, Lunatrick pea
- Botany Photo of the Day is an onion wild relative! Pretty.
- More on that livestock-can-help-reduce-desertification thing, this time from Scientific American.
- Breeding Striga-resistant sorghum. Whatever it takes to protect local beer, boffin-dudes!
- Emmer wheat reviewed to bits.
- No passport data for your barley? Fear not.
- Rachel Laudan ably defends Hawaiian food.
- Origins of almond traced to Iran. Not for the first time.
- Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: A Commons Perspective. Presentation from our friends at FAO.
- Presentation on the untapped potential of cassava in the Great Lakes region of Africa. One of many from CIAT lately. Check out their stuff on beans too.
- The Seed Cathedral of Shanghai. Thanks to those public awareness wizards at Kew.
- Big shindig on biofortification. Be there, or be malnourished.
- Times of India bangs the drum for nutritious millets.
- Yet more loveliness from serious amateur pea breeder Rebsie Fairholm.
A plan to keep cacao alive in Ivory Coast, but for how long?
A long article in the Financial Times a few days ago described the woes of the Ivorian cacao industry. Fundamentally, it’s down to old, and therefore increasingly sick and unproductive, trees. And the quantity squeeze is forcing farmers to compromise on quality.
All this is important because Ivory Coast accounts for 39% of the world’s cacao production. A “chocolate crisis” is looming. And companies like Nestlé are worried. They employ a small army of agronomists, breeders and extensionists just to guarantee their supply of raw materials.
Hence their “Cocoa Plan” to replant 12 million trees (out of a total of 2 billion in the country) over the next decade at a cost of almost $100 million. A monumental task for a crop grown by hundreds of thousands of smallholders. The article does not go into detail on the varieties that are being used in the replanting, beyond saying that they are not GMOs and that the plantlets
…have already been nicknamed “Mercedes” for their supposedly upmarket quality. “They grow very, very quickly,” says Jebouet Kouassi, a 43-year-old who runs one of Nestlé’s nurseries in Ivory Coast.
Neither, alas, does the Cocoa Plan’s website. Elsewhere I found this:
The seedlings will be produced from high-yield and resistant varieties by somatic embryogenesis, which produce replicas of high performance cocoa trees, with high yield and high resistance to disease.
I hope that the narrowing of genetic diversity that this approach seems to imply will not store up problems for the future.