- Remember those photos of global families’ food? The creators answer questions.
- Speaking of funding, an analysis of aid for agriculture published January 2008.
- CABI blogger pushes Nettle Awareness Week. Quite right too.
- “The men don’t know how to sell, they’ll give up the potatoes for next to nothing.“
- Vietnamese pangassius farmers up in arms. Yeah I never heard of it either, but I’ll be looking for it in the market out of solidarity .
- How to involve children in gardening.
Nibbles: NUS, Value-added, Values, Genebank, IPR
- New Agriculturist focuses on neglected species.
- Chocolate, wine… Fellow could have himself a pretty good weekend in Vegas with that lot.
- Irish evaluate biodiversity, apparently ignore agriculture.
- Sasa schemes to save Scottish landraces.
- The Indian Seed and Patent Acts dissected.
Adding value to Peruvian agricultural biodiversity
I hadn’t known about lucuma yogurt (or yoghurt) before seeing this in Lima. Wikipedia says it’s a popular ice cream flavour. I haven’t tried that, but the yogurt is great.
And speaking of added-value products of agrobiodiversity, how about this: potato chips (or crisps) from a whole range of different weird Peruvian high-altitude varieties:
Maize in Africa
An article in the latest Economist discusses the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme. There’s been a fair amount in the media about this lately, and in particular about whether the bumper maize harvests of the past couple of years can be attributed to the extra fertilizer 1 now finding its way onto farmers’ fields increasingly sown to modern varieties, or just to better rains. I think the jury is still out on that one, but check out this statement from the piece in The Economist:
…local seed varieties, little altered from those first brought by the Portuguese centuries ago…
I don’t know about you, but I think that rather underestimates the power of natural selection, drift and recombination. Not to mention 500 growing seasons’ worth of painstaking selection by twenty generations of African farmers.
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.