- SEARICE explains its approach to seed sovereignty and farmer participation.
- Nature on IFPRI’s report on agricultural R&D in Africa. Not pretty.
- Resilience Science on the UN Special Rapporteur’s sustainable intensification thing.
- The Gates Foundation is on a nutritional roll; most of yesterday’s posts are available from this round-up.
- New Mexico gets all protectionist about its chillies.
- IITA explains how it provides healthy germplasm. Various different interesting stories in there, stick with it.
- Farmer conservation power in India.
- How to control invasive species. Eat more weeds.
- Presentation on Trends in global nutrition and health: Local fruits and their potential importance for nutrition and health as seen at Pavlovsk berry meeting.
- Speaking of berries…
- The cerrado (and its crop wild relatives) is in trouble. We talked about this, weren’t you paying attention?
Nibbles: Gardening, Seed Swap, Mapping, Animal Genebank, Rice, Seed Treay, Nanocellulose, Camels, Bread, food Security
- Gardening is good for you. It’s official. And they didn’t even measure nutrition.
- European seed swap in Brussels.
- More fun for mappers; Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication. h/t CAPRi
- Australian animal genebank under threat.
- Filipinos ♥ IRRI.
- Big write up of Seed Treaty‘s recent Governing Body meeting in Bali.
- Wired magazine goes nuts for bananas and other fruits as sources of better plastics.
- Camelicious! The worlds first large-scale camel dairy farm.
- Food strikes in ancient Egypt. They’ve been revolting for more than 3000 years.
- Nice round-up of how indigenous communities in Colombia are protecting their food security.
The way things were
Mr El-Sayed Mohamed El-Azazi, Executive Director of the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank, has posted a comment to one of our previous posts about the looting of his genebank. It includes a link the following presentation on what the place looked like before the fateful day. The call has gone out for help replacing lost equipment. One can only hope it will be heeded.
Nibbles: Policy, Nutrition, Education, Svalbard, Plagues
- Looks interesting: Assessing the impact of rural policy on biodiversity: High Nature Value Farming in Italy. Next Thursday.
- Gates Foundation’s Sylvia Mathews Burwell says Fortify Lives with agriculture and Nutrition. In full.
- Ugandans! Grow sorghum, get a scholarship for your child. Win-win. Cheers, Nile Breweries.
- Australian farmer tells all about Svalbard.
- ILRI speaks about climate change, livestock and plagues — The Economist listens. Respect!
An overlooked global public good
Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, is asking
donors to move away from the model of subsisidised fertilisers and seeds – which he calls “private goods”, to supporting “public goods” such as better infrastructure, strengthening local markets, ensuring access to credit and building storage capabilities.
Alas, I don’t think “storage capabilities” refers to genebanks here. No word on whether Prof. de Schutter would in fact include international crop germplasm collections in that list, but the World Bank certainly does.…