Funding

July 3, 2015July 3, 2015

World Bank plays hardball with agricultural research, maybe

…the future of the institution responsible for the Green Revolution – a consortium of 15 research centers around the world called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) — is under threat. The World Bank, one of its primary funders, is considering withdrawing its financial support.

Well, thank goodness the genebanks at least are safe, eh?

For the CGIAR, the proposed cuts, though painful, would not be devastating; in 2013, the group spent $984 million to fund its activities… Still, the World Bank — the preeminent global development institution — is essentially declaring that agricultural research is not a development priority.

No word from CGIAR. Yet. But then again, adapting agriculture is not that big a deal, is it? Well, Mark Cackler is manager for agriculture and food security at the World Bank, and he seems to think it may be, and that CGIAR have it more or less right:

The Copenhagen Consensus concludes that agricultural research is one of the single most effective investments we could make to fight malnourishment. Therefore, we need more support for bodies like the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research that focus on crops and cropping systems that are of greatest importance to poor farmers and poor countries. Such research is a global public good that the private sector cannot be expected to deliver alone.

What in tarnation is going on at the World Bank?

July 3, 2015July 3, 2015

Nibbles: Monocultures redux, Seedless watermelons, Red kiwifruit, Herbaria problems, Forest foods, Sorghum beer, SIRGEALC, Chinese veggies, Organic tomatoes, Andean women, Rise origins, Fermentation

Deploy your cover crop diversity in time rather than space. But deploy it.
Triploid goodness.
Searching for a red kiwi.
Herbaria on the rack.
Let them eat non-timber forest products.
Sorghum spurts in Kenya. Because beer.
Sign up for SIRGEALC 10.
Knowing your 菠菜 from your 西洋菜.
400 tomato varieties. No pesticides. No water. No problem.
Women are conserving Andean crops. Sure, though with some occasional help from genebanks.
The Rice Origins Wars continue.
Sauerkraut changed the world.

June 4, 2015June 4, 2015

Nibbles: EU meet, Green cities, Gates strategy, Indigenous hunger, Niche coffee, Salinity, Botany rules, Pollinator evidence, Sacred cows, Coke bottles

A couple of EU DGs discuss farming for diversity, maybe even diversity in farming?
They recently heard about urban farming from FAO, which might help. Oh no, wait, that’s a different DG.
Gates Foundation doubles down on nutrition, nice to see agriculture in the mix too.
Meanwhile, efforts are underway to measure the food security of indigenous people in better ways, so that we can figure out whether things like the above are actually working.
Sourcing high quality coffee. I think we can all get behind that goal.
Deconstructing salt tolerance in chickpea.
Botany has an image problem. No, really?
Fact-checking pollinator decline.
Only local cows for Haryana. Seems extreme? Well, Michigan not above doing the same.
Coca-Cola has plant-based bottles. Now to embed some seeds in them.
Maybe Swedish vegetable seeds. Do they have Coke in Sweden?

May 28, 2015May 28, 2015

Nibbles: Cuban heritage, Old food, Forest restoration, Botany in trouble, Community genebanks, Seed book, Beer genomes, Old wheat, Fowler/Naylor, Veggie kiosks, Breeding & data

Cuba recognizes traditional medicine.
Your grandma’s cooking was not that great.
Using genetics to guide teak restoration.
Botany dying in the US.
Brazil sets up lots of community seedbanks.
Aren’t seeds just great?
The 1000 beer genomes project is as great as it sounds.
Palestinians freekeh out.
Interview with Cary Fowler: about Svalbard, and much more.
Mama boga in trouble. Bastards.
Nature calls for crop improvement.

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Brainfood: Resilience and diversity, Cold tolerant rice, Old baobabs, VIR, Local adaptation, Prunus phylogeny, Bactris mating, Land use change, Wheat landraces, Amazonian agrobiodiversity

Does Plant Species Richness Guarantee the Resilience of Local Medical Systems? A Perspective from Utilitarian Redundancy. It depends on how knowledge is distributed.
COLD1 Confers Chilling Tolerance in Rice. From a wild relative.
Searching for the Oldest Baobab of Madagascar: Radiocarbon Investigation of Large Adansonia rubrostipa Trees. 1,600 years seems to be the record.
Genetic resources of cultivated plants as the basis for Russia’s food and environmental security. VIR needs Roubles 425 million a year ($14.3 million).
Using archaeogenomic and computational approaches to unravel the history of local adaptation in crops. Models say that adaptation to higher latitudes was rapid, simple (few genes) and unstable.
Combining conservative and variable markers to infer the evolutionary history of Prunus subgen. Amygdalus s.l. under domestication. Almonds and peaches were domesticated on either side of the Central Asian Massif from different sections of the genus that had been there for 5 million years.
Conservation implications of the mating system of the Pampa Hermosa landrace of peach palm analyzed with microsatellite markers. Bactris effective population size in genebanks is too small.
Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity. Within-sample total terrestrial species diversity down by 13.6% globally. About the same for crop wild relatives?
Exploiting genetic diversity from landraces in wheat breeding for adaptation to climate change. It would be a good idea.
Household Agrobiodiversity Management on Amazonian Dark Earths, Oxisols, and Floodplain Soils on the Lower Madeira River, Brazil. Age of household head, size of household and area of land under cultivation predict amount of agricultural biodiversity managed.