Funding

November 16, 2009

Agrobiodiversity features in 2009 Development Marketplace awards

Our friend Ehsan Dulloo of Bioversity International is the frontman for a project that has just been selected as one of the winners of this year’s Development Marketplace awards.

A DM grant will enable Biodiversity International to protect the livelihoods of some 200 vulnerable women farmers, by providing access to seeds for locally-adapted varieties of crops. The project draws from gene banks, indigenous knowledge and farmer know-how, as well as traditional ways of adapting to climate variability.

There are several other agrobiodiversity projects among the winners. For example, “Peru’s Associación ANDES will support plant-breeding to increase diversity and production of nutritious potatoes and other tubers, improving health, incomes and quality of life for the community’s people.” And in the Philippines the “Trowel Development Foundation will replant mangroves and set up a value-chain system to fatten and market tie-crabs.” Well worth exploring the whole list. Congratulations to all.

November 12, 2009November 12, 2009

Nibbles: Quince, Coffee, Chocolate, Nutrition, Africa

Speaking of Cinderella fruits, quince gets a good going over.
Coffee prices and more — from the market marker’s mouth. h/t cas-ip.
Some chocolate might help distressed coffee growers.
IFPRI milking its Millions Fed. We highlight Improving diet quality and micronutrient nutrition and The mungbean transformation diversifying crops, defeating malnutrition.
China gets cracking in Mozambique. Maybe they’ll be waking up exhausted seeds.

November 4, 2009November 4, 2009

Plastic banana weirdness

I’ve just discovered this bit of inanity, a month or so late. Queen’s University Belfast has a slice of a €1 million study known as the Badana project, to “develop new procedures to incorporate by-products from banana plantations in the Canary Islands into the production of rotationally moulded plastics”. Why? Because:

Once the fruit has been harvested, the rest of the banana plant goes to waste. An estimated 25,000 tonnes of this natural fibre is dumped in ravines around the Canaries every year.

How, I wonder, do they maintain the organic content of the soil in which those bananas grow? No chance of recycling all that waste fibre, is there?

Ireland’s Daily Star newspaper headlined the story “Boffins go bananas”. I’d have preferred “Boffins are bananas.”

October 29, 2009October 29, 2009

Nibbles: Chocolate, Bloggers, Tokyo rice, Breeding, Nutrition

Yesterday was National Chocolate Day. ¹ Who knew? Not even the experts.
Oxford 2009; report of the veg bloggers and breeders get-together.
Ginza rice farm. What happened?
How do we fund plant breeding? You will let us know, won’t you.
More Food May Not Mean Less Hunger. Say it isn’t so.

October 28, 2009October 28, 2009

Development Marketplace

The World Bank’s Development Marketplace opens its doors on Tuesday 10 November. The idea is “to identify 20 to 25 innovative, early-stage projects addressing climate adaptation” and support them with grants of up to USD 200,000.

You may remember that last year our friend Hannes Dempewolf was one of the winners. ² Is there anything this year of interest to agricultural biodiversity? Hard to say, mostly because the list of 100 finalists is available only as a PDF and doesn’t give a whole heap of information, but on past form, there’s bound to be. The Development Marketplace blog may be the place to follow the action, and if you’re around the World Bank, and have registered at the Marketplace’s web site, why not visit and send us your predictions of likely winners?