- Remember to eat blueberries to remember.
- Darwin’s tomatoes? The genetic change identified.
- Wild coffee conservation. Danny says wild coffee genes assessed at between 0.4 and 1.5 billion US$. Joe not available for comment.
- “But if you don’t grow your seed, you lose your power.”
- Amadumbe being sold to supermarkets in South Africa. Great. But someone please tell me: what the heck is it?
- More coffee? More for coffee!
- “Sometimes our expert is stumped.”
- Mark Bittman makes the case for vegetarianism (and much more) on TED video. Money quote: “It’s not the beta-catotene, it’s the plant.”
- FAO maps Myanmar agriculture.
Nibbles: Trees, AGRA, pig meat, culinodiversity, fund raising, seed, data
- Let them eat leaves: farmers to plant trees in Kenya.
- For the archives: Rockefeller Foundation’s original blueprint for A Green Revolution for Africa (PDF).
- Keeping it real, computers and genetics monitor Iberian ham.
- Eat diversity to conserve it.
- Three-headed coconut tree for sale. To you, one million bucks.
- Video on FAO seed project in Afghanistan. I just hope somebody’s taking care of the landraces.
- Scientists exhorted to geo-reference. IRRI GIS staff unavailable for comment.
Nibbles: Hotspots, tea, silk, photos, food prices, basil, AGRA, rice, Denmark, SADC
- Economist blogger tells conservationists to stop with the hotspot mapping already, and conserve something. DIVA-GIS developers unavailable for comment.
- Some of the tea in China.
- Filipinos abandon cannabis for silk. Jeremy comments: you can smoke silk?
- Nice tree photos.
- FT does the interactive thing with rising food prices. Via. Let them eat pasta, I say.
- Wanted: more mid-sized farms to fight The Man.
- Watch out world. Mississippi set to industrialise basil production.
- Ten reasons AGRA won’t work.
- A tale of two rice-growers; how the crop has fared in Brazil and China.
- Danes meet to save seeds.
- Southern Africans meet to save seeds.
African protected areas surveyed
The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:
The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.
It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.
Nibbles: lard, ICTs, rice maps
- Leave the mozzarella. Take the lard.
- Great post, great paper on mobile phones and the price of fish. Via.
- Rice distribution maps, current and historical.