Category: Featured

The SPAM discussion continues. That would be SPAM the Spatial Production Allocation Model, for those who haven’t been paying attention. Next up in Churchillian mood is Stanley Wood:

What steps are we taking to improve the reliability of this data? Actually quite a few. Not all of which bear fruit in the short term.

But read about them anyway. There are other comments in there too. Including the expected one from Jacob suggesting that the answer is, wait for it, crowsourcing.

Glenn enlists Churchill in rebuking Luigi for being too hard on his IFPRI friends about SPAM:

SPAM is for broad scale analysis. It is like what Churchill said about democracy, god-awful, but much better than anything else.

What do you think? Does he protest too much?

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.