- Farmer suicides in India blamed most recently on high food prices. The BBC debunks the numbers, and about everything else about the claims, without mentioning IFPRI.
- Reviving the ethnobotanic gardens at the University of Kent in England.
- Zanzibari women are successfully farming seaweed.
- Sweet potatoes came from all over.
- Unpacking sustainable livestock, one slide at the time.
- Sandy Knapp et al. chase Solanum all over South America.
- Everybody’s developing their own sustainable cocoa strategies. Not ideal.
Nibbles: Quinoa to and fro, Pasta past, Madagascar prospecting, Hunger games, Livestock genetics, Smallholder technologies, Wheat LOLA, ESA and the ITPGRFA, Development and the CAP, Conservation agriculture, Development in hard places, Food & culture exhibition
- Quinoa is bad. Well, good for some. No, good for everyone. No, really. Damn, this story is complicated!
- The story of pasta is pretty convoluted too.
- Collecting in Madagascar can be tricky.
- Lots of ways to combat hunger, no easy way to figure out which is best.
- On the other hand, it’s very easy to see how livestock genetics will feed the world. No, wait…
- FAO has a nifty website on “Technologies and practices for small agricultural producers” but even the “advanced interface” (sic) lacks an RSS feed. I ask you, how difficult is it to bung in an RSS feed? Anyway, there is some stuff on participatory breeding and diversification, though if you use the search term “landraces”, it helpfully suggests you may have meant “landslides.”
- I don’t suppose FAO is in any case interested in the Landrace Pillar of the Wheat Pre-Breeding Lola. Nope, didn’t think so.
- The European Seed Association doesn’t like the latest EU report on IP rights and genetic resources. They think the ITPGRFA not sufficiently recognized. Not as complicated as the quinoa controversy, but I storified it anyway. And then had to export it to a really ugly PDF in 2018 when that all came to an end.
- Still at the EU, Olivier De Schutter thinks they need to “development-proof” the CAP. Too difficult to think through the connection to the above, but I’m sure it exists.
- The 3rd International Conference on Conservation Agriculture in Southeast Asia has its proceedings online. Not just conservation agriculture, though. If you look hard enough there’s some conservation of agriculture. If you see what I mean. You get both in Miguel Altieri’s vision, of course.
- Development is a hard row to hoe. Especially if you’re into fish.
- Nothing hard, at least on the eyes, about the AMNH’s Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture exhibition.
Nibbles: Genome assembly, Congo livelihoods, Tilman, Peak farmland, Lima bean project, Cotton award, Translocation, Sudanese seed, Pachyrhizus, Conference, Agro-ecology, SEAVEG, Indigenous foodways,
- The latest genomic whiz-bangery.
- CIFOR’s Congo slideshow makes The Guardian. About as far from genomic whiz-bangery as you can get.
- Speaking of which… Very long talk by David Tilman. Almost certainly worth watching in its entirety. Eventually. It all depends on trade-offs. See what I did there?
- Agriculture stops expanding. Is it all that genomic whiz-bangery?
- U. of Delaware gets big Lima bean grant. Yes, Delaware. They got whiz-bangery in Delaware too.
- Meanwhile, Texan cotton breeder gets award. For a certain amount of whiz-bangery.
- Translocation and restoration: cool, but a last resort, whiz-bangery says.
- Support for the seed sector in S. Sudan. Any landraces? No whiz-bangery in sight.
- And likewise for the yam bean in Africa.
- Wonder whether that’ll be on the agenda at the First Food Security Futures Conference in April. Probably not.
- Nor, probably, will anyone be thinking too hard about agro-ecology; but you could be, with this handy-dandy introduction to holistic management.
- SEAVEG; no, not nori etc, but veg in SE Asia.
- Different animals need different kinds of fodder, ILRI shows how.
- Wishing success to the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative launched at the University of Arkansas today.
What’s gin got to do with the price of corn?
Just caught up with a fascinating NPR interview with Richard Barnett, author of The Book of Gin. What struck me particularly was a section on the origins of the gin boom in England. Barnett tied it to The Glorious Revolution, and William of Orange coming to the throne. William needed to keep the land-owning aristos sweet. One way to do that was to keep the price of grain high, and one way to do that was to deregulate distilling. That, as Barnett explained, opened up a new market for grain, which kept grain prices high, even as it made gin cheaper and cheaper.
So the aristos were presumably happy enough to keep supporting King Billy, and there NPR left it to wander down Gin Lane and beyond.
But the story sounds an awful lot like the contemporary story of mandated maize biofuel. That too opens up a new market that keeps prices high, and, some say, is keeping food prices high too.
So here’s my question: did the demand for grain for distilling have any impact on food prices in the 18th century?
Brainfood: Climate in Cameroon, Payments for Conservation, Finger Millet, GWAS, Populus genome, miRNA, C4, Cadastres, Orange maize, Raised beds, Contingent valuation, Wild edibles, Sorghum genomics, Brazilian PGR, Citrus genomics
- Climate and Food Production: Understanding Vulnerability from Past Trends in Africa’s Sudan-Sahel. Investment in smallholder farmers can reduce vulnerability, it says here.
- An evaluation of the effectiveness of a direct payment for biodiversity conservation: The Bird Nest Protection Program in the Northern Plains of Cambodia. It works, if you get it right; now can we see some more for agricultural biodiversity?
- Finger millet: the contribution of vernacular names towards its prehistory. You wouldn’t believe how many different names there are, or how they illuminate its spread.
- Genome-Wide Association Studies. How to do them. You need a platform with that?
- Revisiting the sequencing of the first tree genome: Populus trichocarpa. Why to do them.
- Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA. “…exogenous plant miRNAs in food can regulate the expression of target genes in mammals.” Nuff said. We just don’t understand how this regulation business works, do we.
- Anatomical enablers and the evolution of C4 photosynthesis in grasses. It’s the size of the vascular bundle sheath, stupid!
- Land administration for food security: A research synthesis. Administration meaning registration, basically. Can be good for smallholders, via securing tenure, at least in theory. Governments like it for other reasons, of course. However you slice it, though, the GIS jockeys need to get out more.
- Genetic Analysis of Visually Scored Orange Kernel Color in Maize. It’s better than yellow.
- Comment on “Ecological engineers ahead of their time: The functioning of pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture and its potential contributions to sustainability today” by Dephine Renard et al. Back to the future. Not.
- Environmental stratifications as the basis for national, European and global ecological monitoring. Bet it wouldn’t take much to apply it to agroecosystems for agrobiodiversity monitoring.
- Use of Contingent Valuation to Assess Farmer Preference for On-farm Conservation of Minor Millets: Case from South India. Fancy maths suggests farmers willing to receive money to grow crops.
- Wild food plant use in 21st century Europe: the disappearance of old traditions and the search for new cuisines involving wild edibles. The future is Noma.
- Population genomic and genome-wide association studies of agroclimatic traits in sorghum. Structuring by morphological race, and geography within races. Domestication genes confirmed. Promise of food for all held out.
- Response of Sorghum to Abiotic Stresses: A Review. Ok, it could be kinda bad, but now we have the above, don’t we.
- Genetic resources: the basis for sustainable and competitive plant breeding. In Brazil, that is.
- A nuclear phylogenetic analysis: SNPs, indels and SSRs deliver new insights into the relationships in the ‘true citrus fruit trees’ group (Citrinae, Rutaceae) and the origin of cultivated species. SNPs better than SSRs in telling taxa apart. Results consistent with taxonomic subdivisions and geographic origin of taxa. Some biochemical pathway and salt resistance genes showing positive selection. No doubt this will soon lead to tasty, nutritious varieties that can grow on beaches.