- Is the World Producing Enough Food? The NY Times has the answer(s).
- Aussies trying to get to grips with salinity through breeding. Very cool, but maybe they should just stop growing wheat and think of some other crop?
- Potato Park potatoes to be parked in the Bóveda Global de Semillas de Svalbard.
- You know what those naughty Vikings used to say: “Let there be mirth, mead and fornication!”
- Adding value to peanuts in Bolivia. KIT video.
Nibbles: Fruits x2, Rice, Forests, Dogs
- Feeding the world with breadfruit.
- Feeding the world with ngali nut. Well, the Solomons.
- Feeding the world with sticky rice. Well, Laos.
- Threatened forest hotspots mapped, and discussed. Why is it we haven’t done this for agrobiodiversity?
- Man takes best friend to grave, old and very old.
Nibbles: CBNRM, Extension, Seed systems, Climate change book and conferences, Cassava, Endophytes, Old Irish Goats, Plant Cuttings, Ethnobotany, Weeds
- Designing the next generation of community-based natural resource management projects. No agriculture. Weird. Well, not so much actually.
- Extension systems have a website! Yeah but do they need one?
- Informal seed system working just fine in Indian Himalayas. So maybe the extension system is not needed? But, hey, they have a website, did I mention that?
- Climate Change and Crop Production: The Book. And: The Conference. No but wait, here’s another.
- The unusual crop that is cassava.Yeah, but in The Economist?
- ” …among the largest collections of endophytes…” Not a lot of people know that.
- Old Irish goats (and others, to be fair) meet to talk about, well, Old Irish goats.
- The great Plant Cuttings.
- How to design an ethnobotanical garden. Would coca find a place?
- Musings on the evolution of weeds.
Uncontacted agrobiodiversity
Survival International has a new website on Uncontacted Tribes:
More than 100 tribes around the world reject contact with outsiders. This is their story.
Somewhat weirdly, the website includes a map, although it is pointed out that it “won’t help anyone make ‘first contact.’ But it will help to stop oil companies and loggers from invading the lands of uncontacted tribes.”
Be that as it may, I could not resist mashing it up in Google Earth 1 with the data in Genesys on the world’s holdings of agrobiodiversity. This is the result for an area comprising the Brazilian state of Rondonia and some surrounding regions.
Not surprisingly, there’s not much in the way of germplasm accessions from the general areas occupied by uncontacted tribes. Oil and logging companies may not be the only things that these tribes should be worried about.
Nibbles: Dog, Beer, Human Planet, Entomophagy, Food Atlas, Pepper, Barley
- When dog was on the menu.
- Going far, and far back, for beer. And indeed yeast. Always worth the effort.
- BBC launches Human Planet, focusing on “man’s remarkable relationship with the natural world.” Which apparently doesn’t include agriculture.
- Mexicans eat many moth species, and not just the larvae.
- Amazing interactive food atlas for the US. wish I had a use for it, but someone surely does.
- Breeding a “better” Jalapeño pepper — to hold more cheese, natcho.
- Food as politics; the tsampa-eaters of the TAR. h/t GOOD.