- The Committee on World Food Security is meeting in Rome. If that’s the kind of thing that whets your appetite, follow #cfs40 on Twitter.
- Where, if it’s not too late, you’ll find me offering mouth-watering nutritional advice.
- Up a gum tree; ICRAF clones puffpo piece. Whatever happened to added value?
- GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — has a new portal. But is it a better portal?
- And you can watch GBIF’s Science Symposium 2013 live in just under 85 minutes, and counting.
Nibbles: Access to Seeds, Bunch of meetings, CGIAR on the job, Smartt obit, Soybean mysteries, Apple grafting, FAO food security report
- “The Access to Seeds Index measures the performance of the leading companies in the seed industry independently, which will result in the publication of a ranking every two years.” Will need to keep an eye on this. As no doubt also will the CGIAR…
- …which met in Lisbon to discuss the Generation Challenge Programme and presented on NUS at Tropentag, having moved on from the Science Forum in Bonn, which had a lot on nutrition. No doubt some of them will be in Lillehammer to discuss plant genetic resources and climate change. How do they keep on top of it all?
- And when they are not meeting, they are surveying the use of Gnetum, sampling goats, and making videos about their genebanks among many other worthwhile things…
- Speaking of the IRRI genebank, Mike Jackson’s obituary of his friend Dr Joe Smartt, “geneticist and renowned grain legume expert,” is online at GRACE, but behind a paywall. Fortunately, you can get a condensed version on Mike’s blog.
- Legumes, I hear you say? “Two big mysteries in soybeans have captured my attention.” And I’m sure that sentence captured yours. Corn+Soybean Digest reveals all.
- Time for dessert. I see your 300-variety mango of Malihabad and I raise you a 250-variety apple of Chidham.
- But lest we forget why we’re doing all this meeting and goat-sampling and fruit-grafting, here comes FAO’s latest report on food insecurity.
Nibbles: Lathyrism, Ancient maize, Sustainable cacao, Bioversity on agrobiodiversity, Weird fruits, Carrot seed, Palm wine, Buckwheat, Halophytes issue, Weird(ish) crops, Urban malnutrition, Old oranges, Molasses, Indian tree institute
- An ODAP detective story.
- Ancient maize gets a map.
- Diversity is the key to sustainable cacao.
- New Bioversity DG answers the tough questions.
- Be the first on your block with an unusual fruit tree.
- How to grow awesome carrot seed.
- The hard life of Nigerian wine tappers.
- Bringing back buckwheat in Bhutan.
- Annals of Botany to do halophytes.
- Come down to earth with the realization that most people have never heard of cowpea and cassava. Would they have heard of black-eyed peas and tapioca, though?
- Big report on urban malnutrition. Maybe cassava (see above) can help?
- The last orange grove in the San Fernando Valley. No word on what the variety might be.
- All about molasses.
- Indian tree breeding institute, and accompanying genebank, get a write-up.
- Yes, I know that I could have done a better job of pointing out the connections among some of these things, but it’s been a long week.
Nibbles: Landscapes pod, Tartiness evolution, Diversity pix, Eve Crowley vid, Commons debate, Subsidies, Arabidopsis database, Beard beer, Kew herbarium vid, Minoan pests, FDish seeds, Extinction is forever
- CIFOR scientist talks about the much-vaunted landscape approach.
- The repeated evolution of lemony flavour.
- Nice infographic of breadfruit diversity in the Pacific.
- Better infographic of chili pepper diversity in Mexico. Both are on Facebook. Hope you guys can see them.
- FAO’s Eve Crowley is didactic and inspirational by turns about women, co-operatives and rural development.
- Hardin vs Ostrom. Walk-over.
- How much does production have to increase, really? Lobell deals the cards.
- What are the effects of input subsidies on maize prices in Malawi and Zambia? Small to none.
- Plant database to charge for access? Never a good idea.
- Ok, here’s a first, a beer I don’t altogether feel like tasting.
- Last days of the soybean homecoming show in Hong Kong. Anybody out there seen it?
- Video on the intricacies of Kew. Not as long as you’d think.
- Weevils in sweet pea jar pinpoint season of Santorini eruption. Has anyone tried to recover DNA from the seeds?
- Experts for ensuring quality fish seeds to enhance production. Say what?
- How should we mark the extinction of the passenger pigeon next year?
Brainfood: Wheat breeding, Wild chicken diversity, Wild rice diversity, Sustainable biofuels, Biofuels and biodiversity, Land sparing & sharing, Soil fertility, Cooking cassava, Cherimoya value chains
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Tetraploid Wheats (Triticum turgidum L.) Estimated by SSR, DArT and Pedigree Data. Diversity in morphology and storage proteins in Italian durum varieties decreases after 1990, but not in molecular markers.
- Genetics driven interventions for ex situ conservation of red junglefowl (Gallus gallus murghi) populations in India. 9 birds from the most diverse population of 4 were selected to breed with all the others to rescue them from the perils of inbreeding.
- Geographic variation and local adaptation in Oryza rufipogon across its climatic range in China. Some variation correlated with geography, but plenty of plasticity too.
- Debate: Can Bioenergy Be Produced in a Sustainable Manner That Protects Biodiversity and Avoids the Risk of Invaders? It depends. But they’re not talking about agricultural biodiversity.
- Scenarios for future biodiversity loss due to multiple drivers reveal conflict between mitigating climate change and preserving biodiversity. Looks like growing biofuels to counter climate change might not be a great biodiversity conservation strategy. But we knew that from the above.
- Beyond ‘land sparing versus land sharing’: environmental heterogeneity, globalization and the balance between agricultural production and nature conservation. As the scale of analysis increases, you have to be more careful about addressing environmental heterogeneity. You mean like mosaics?
- Overview of long term experiments in Africa. Rotations are better than monoculture for soil fertility. Well, it’s good to have the data.
- Effects of boiling and frying on the bioaccessibility of β-carotene in yellow-fleshed cassava roots (Manihot esculenta Crantz cv. BRS Jari). Fry away. Finally some good news.
- Value chains of cherimoya (Annona cherimola Mill.) in a centre of diversity and its on-farm conservation implications. They can be bad.