Funding

Nibbles: Mopani, Svalbard, Chestnut blight, West African eats, Megareport, Fungi, Smallanthus, Innovation, MSB video, Pacific bananas

No more mopani worms in Zimbabwe. Luigi distraught.
More tosh on Svalbard. Nobody distraught.
Chestnut blight threatens UK chestnuts. Castanophiles distraught.
The oily charms of West African cuisine. Did someone say “oily”?
Another big panel of the great and the good has issued a deafening report; Gordon Conway, panellist, tells us “How to create resilient agriculture“.
DFID fertilises Vietnamese mushroom farms. Kept in the dark and fed manure?
Yacon spotted in Malaysia. Just ask for snow lotus fruit.
The World Bank has published a Sourcebook on Agricultural Innovation. So can we all go home now?
Step inside the Millennium Seed Bank. A video.
ProMusa disentangles Pacific bananas, the better to conserve them.

Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda will invest $1.2 million each over the next three years to revive the Institute of Agricultural and Zootechnical Research. Local solutions to global problems.

The vocabulary of the commons.
An interview with Tom Wagner, a great tomato and potato breeder.
The CGIAR Consortium has a newsletter, with bits in it about what they’re doing on agrobiodiversity, genebanks (such as this one), all that stuff. But I guess news of this big Africa-wide food security project came in too late. Oh, here’s another one, on ICRISAT’s new chickpea.
Pat Heslop-Harrison on domestication. I am reliably informed he once extracted DNA from a fruit smoothie using nothing but household utensils and cleaning chemicals. Pat, is there a video?
Urban ag in the Philippines. For some reason, there’s been a ton of this sort of urban food stuff on the tubes lately. Like this for instance. And this (compare current orchards in London with historical ones). I may just have to blog about it. Oh dear, I just have.
The Glasgow Herald heralds the importance of Vavilov’s potatoes.
Long post with lots of different bits of info on lots of perennial crops.
Monitoring drought in Africa via pretty maps. And more pretty maps in search of a use.
Ancient Aegean lathyrism? Dirk alerted.
A keeper of seeds does his stuff near Pittsburgh.

Is it not ironic that on the same day that Bill Gates suggests national targets and reports cards for agricultural productivity, boffins are decrying the use of unidimensional indicators of country-level success in another sphere? Report cards for agricultural sustainability, anyone? For levels of agricultural biodiversity in situ and ex situ?

Higher maize yields? Plant cover crops between the rows.
Barley tempeh! My kind of food exploration.
Danny Hunter impresses Irish Times with need to conserve biodiversity.
UK devotes millions to research for “bigger yields of better quality fruits and vegetables”.
Germans embrace high-tech urban agriculture — cautiously.
Put farmers’ markets near medical centres for added benefits. What happens when everyone’s so healthy they don’t need the doctor?