Nibbles: Fashion, Climate change meeting, Yams in the Pacific, Poor excuse to quote Bob Dylan song, AnGR, Food in the Pacific, Cacao, Iraqi marshes

Variety Savers of Europe try to unite

The European Network of Breed and Seed Savers is a website for listing all keepers of indigenous livestock breeds and culivators of indigenous cultivated plants found in Europe. Variety-Savers should be used to network, to share information, to list events and to sell products and services relating to conservation of European agrobiodiversity.

Just off the ground, and only 14 members so far, but this looks like an interesting initiative. Especially if it manages to bring formal-sector genebanks closer together with on-farm conservation practitioners and amateur heirloom enthusiasts. You do have to register, but it’s fairly painless, and the website provides some fancy social networking tools. Very best wishes!

Ethiopian Agriculture Portal misplaces crop diversity

The Ethiopian Agriculture Portal (EAP) is a gateway to agricultural information relevant to development of Ethiopian agriculture. EAP makes access to information easier because it uses a simple, logically laid-out web interface from which users can access documents on agricultural commodities important to Ethiopia. The collection includes many documents in local languages mainly Amharic…

The intended audiences of the portal are all those engaged in public or private agricultural development endeavors in Ethiopia; including extension, research, higher education, private sector, and other government and non-government stakeholders. In short, it serves national and international entities interested in Ethiopian agriculture as partners in trade, investment, or development.

A very worthy effort, and not badly done. But one is sorry not to see any mention of the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation in Addis Ababa, with it’s storied genebank housing a unique collection of local crop germplasm. And although it is welcome to see, under “Other Resources”, reference to the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System and the Domestic Animal Genetic Resources Information System, one longs for similar exposure for international databases on plant genetic resources, in particular those of the CGIAR Centres, whose data is of course also now available through Genesys.

Nibbles: Genebank, Sweet wheat, Participatory Research, Land “grab”, Yampah, Vegetables, Tea, Chilling, Rainforest products, Asses, Climate proofing, Natural products