Category: Featured

Robert is unimpressed by at least one of the CGIAR’s 40 talents, “biological control of two devastating insect pests”.

This was about fixing what other researchers had broken when they shipped infected South American cassava to Africa. I understand it was fixed by finding a natural enemy in South America and bringing that to Africa as well.

It was great that the CGIAR did this, and employed an entomologist to do it, but there would have alternative suppliers aplenty. Any decent entomologist could have done that.

So wouldn’t this have happened anyway, perhaps a little bit later? If so the counter-factual is “basically the same result” (no impact). Entirely different thing from investing in a breeding program. Or a genebank.

And he has a nice little coda on using such efforts as a tool for extortion.

Somewhat belatedly (but they have other things on their mind) a message from Vavilov’s institute supporting the rebirth of Plant Genetic Resources newsletter:

Scientists and curators from the N.I.Vavilov Institute fully support this initiative. PGR Newsletter very important valuable publication and source of information for PGR community.

So what’s the story, Theo and Robert? Is no news good news? Let us have an update.

How is Distichlis palmeri like Cordyline australis? Find out here.

Peter Matthews weighs in on the issue of whether threatened language means threatened agrobiodiversity:

I would expect that the key linguistic indicator is not threat level, but speaking population size – not too large (likely to be associated with monocultural production systems) and not too small (likely to have a very restricted geographical range and knowledge of a relatively limited range of crops and wild plant resources).

Boba sets Luigi right on the age of some bas reliefs:

The iconography of the date tree is Byzantine, as is the depiction of the lambs. Down the road a bit, in Ravenna, (which Venice supplanted as the premier Italian harbor on the Adriatic) is Sant Apollinare. It dates to the 6th century (500 CE) and has interesting mosaics on it.