- Food sovereignty — or lack of it — in the Pacific.
- That should probably start with taro.
- Could the banks help?
- Or blockchain?
- How about an international year?
- And better seed laws?
- Let’s change the subject…
- ICARDA durum breeders run towards the problem, use wild relatives, win prize.
- Wild relatives are good for chickpea improvement too.
- Don’t worry, if we lose an animal breed, we can always get it back. Kinda sorta.
- Source of information on heirloom varieties. Yes, there’s probably something similar for pigs.
Nibbles: Problematic edition
- That claim of Neolithic Georgian wine is, ahem, problematic.
- Yam cultivation can be, ahem, problematic.
- Neglecting women in breeding programmes can be, ahem, problematic.
- Khat cultivation is, ahem, problematic.
- Post-conquest depictions of the cacao plant were, ahem, problematic.
- Imperial plant collecting was, ahem, problematic. But the BBC doesn’t care.
- I find the claim that the potato saved Europe from war, ahem, problematic.
- No problem at all about cooking taro.
Nibbles: Tamed, Avocado trifecta, Chinese art, Opuntia, Breeding book, Ari.Farm, Grand Canyon ag
- Nice podcast on Prof. Alice Roberts’ book on domestication, Tamed.
- Remember yesterday’s Nibble on Mexico’s avocado security problem? Wait till they start growing these seedless ones. Or this one, for that matter.
- Is this jade bok choy the most famous botanically-themed work of art?
- Let them eat cactus.
- Plant breeding as a business: the book.
- You can use Bitcoin to buy Somali goats.
- Corn wasn’t king in the ancient American SW. Ruderals were.
Vavilov everywhere
A couple of weeks ago, the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR) held the IV International Vavilov Conference “N.I. Vavilov’s Ideas in the Modern World.” I don’t know if the presentations will go online at some point, but I do have a hardcopy of the abstracts volume and could send a scan if anyone is really interested I suppose. 1 I hope that that doesn’t turn out to be a hostage to fortune.
And let me take the opportunity of thanking the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society for making the contents of the N.I. Vavilov Centenary Symposium from 1990 freely available.
Where does the SDG indicator data come from?
Just a quick reminder that the new Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS) is now live on the FAO website, as recently predicted. This is the source for SDG indicators 2.5.1 and 2.5.2.
I’ve actually just come back from a meeting at FAO organized by the plant equivalent of DAD-IS, the World Information and Early Warning System (WIEWS) on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which funnels data into the plant part of indicator 2.5.1. More on that later.