- Yams heading for trouble. What to do?
- Learn something from wild relatives, like they’re doing with tomatoes?
- Go for a totally new plant breeding paradigm?
- I know, let’s all go out and celebrate World Bamboo Day!
- Switzerland gives Laos US$6.3m in support of government’s agrobiodiversity initiative.
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation gives Growing Power US$5m in support of Growing Power’s urban agriculture efforts.
- National Geographic gives leaves a good going-over without mentioning agriculture.
- Farmers in Kerala give Navara red rice as a reason for good health and prosperity.
- World gives Monty Jones, rice breeder, high status.
- Paul Collier fan gives African governance the blame for low agricultural productivity.
Nibbles: Deforestation, Mayan collapse, Agroforestry, One Acre Fund, School gardens
- Cutting down forests worsened ancient Mayan droughts.
- And (among other things) did for the Maya.
- And despite the Mayan end of the world being near, the French are revitalising agroforestry.
- The Financial Times wrote about One Acre Fund’s work to reduce agrobiodiversity in Kenya, then put it behind a paywall (for me). So One Acre Fund sprung it.
- School gardens continue to flourish in some places.
The CGIAR reform explained
Frank Rijsberman, CEO of the CGIAR Consortium, gave a seminar at IFPRI yesterday on the topic of the CGIAR reform. You can watch it below, but if you want to see the slides properly, you’ll have to go somewhere else. I wonder if there’s a way to intercut the video with still shots of the slides.
You may be intrigued by the statement that the CGIAR now has “15 (+1) programs.” The details are on the CGIAR Consortium and CGIAR Fund websites, though, confusingly, you get different sorts of details in the two places. Anyway, the research portfolio is perhaps most succinctly summarized here. The 15 things Dr Rijsberman referred to are the so-called CGIAR Research Programs (CRP). The “(+1)” refers to the “Long Term Support of CGIAR Genebanks,” 1 which is somewhat different, being described as a “CRP Research Support Program.” I’m not sure that it’s entirely appropriate to relegate what are often described as the crown jewels of the CGIAR system to a bracketed addendum, but we shouldn’t quibble. It’s certainly very good to see some of the world’s most important genebanks properly taken care of.
Nibbles: Genebanks on the edge
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?