- Sweet potato and milk “potaghurt”. Just one way Ghanaian women gain from roots and tubers.
- Another way being through a US$12 million project “to boost yam productivity”.
- Dual purpose crops to sustain livestock and people in India.
- Qocho in Chicago. Calling enset “false-banana” doesn’t do it justice.
- Cowpeas came to Mexico from three separate continents, but is The Beaneater really eating cowpeas? Not necessarily.
- We need to see the trees for the woods, says a new book from ICRAF.
Mufhoho for the masses, finger millet for the rest of us
The Gaia Foundation recently featured a slideshow about the work of the Mupo Foundation. The slideshow is all about finger millet (Eleusine coracana) in Venda, a region of South Africa. Mupo says it:
[S]trengthens local communities in ecological governance by reviving indigenous seed, facilitating and encouraging intergenerational learning, and rebuilding confidence in the value of indigenous knowledge systems.
That kind of language probably wows donors; I hope so. What it comes down to, though, is helping young people to learn from those who have not yet forgotten about crops that are better for them and their environment. Finger millet certainly fits the bill. The Mupo Foundation is gathering, storing and sharing finger millet diversity, promoting its nutritional value, and preserving rituals and traditions that depend on millet. It would be nice to think that they could be funded under a new call for proposals for research on Improving rural livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa: Sustainable and climate-smart intensification of agricultural production. Maybe even trialling some of the 5957 varieties that ICRISAT says it has in its genebank, to see whether any can deliver additional benefits under changing climate regimes.
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.
Nibbles: African Funding
- 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.
Nibbles: Commons, Tom Wagner, CGIAR, Domestication presentation, Sophisticated urbanites, Vavilov’s potatoes in the news, Perennial crops, African drought, Aegean lathyrism, Heirlooms
- 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.