- Coffee: variety or varietal?
- Malloreddus: from Campideno or Campidano?
- Wheat: annual or perennial?
- Landrace conference: to go or not to go?
- Garum: to be or not to be?
- Potato: but blue?
- Microbial collections: to charge or not to charge?
- Agrobiodiversity: use it or lose it?
- Apples: but seedlings?
Reports galore for the CFS
It’s the time of year for major reports, I guess. Here’s what’s on the table:
- HLPE. 2017. Nutrition and food systems. A report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome.
- FAO. 2017. The State of Food and Agriculture 2017 — Leveraging food systems for inclusive rural transformation. FAO, Rome.
- IPES-Food. 2017. Unravelling the Food–Health Nexus: Addressing practices, political economy, and power relations to build healthier food systems. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food and IPES-Food.
You can follow the discussion on all these and more on the webcast of the 44th session of the Committee on World Food Security.
Maybe we should just have stayed hunters and gatherers?
Botanical gardens need to look to the tropics
A monumental study of the plant species conserved in botanical gardens has just been published, and is getting quite a lot of traction in the media. The headline numbers are impressive: “botanic gardens manage at least 105,634 species, equating to 30% of all plant species diversity, and conserve over 41% of known threatened species.” It is worrying, however, that three quarters of the species that are absent from botanical gardens collections are tropical in origin. Lots of hot, sweaty work still do be done.
Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity Index, PPB, Heirloom rice, CATIE genebank, Faberge potato, Val @CePaCT, Nigerian food, Ethnobotanical book, Hope Jahren quote
- Bioversity DG lobbies for the Agrobiodiversity Index.
- One of her staff lobbies for participatory plant breeding. And he’s not the only one.
- Maybe they could tackle Indian rice next?
- Protecting cacao at CATIE.
- Faberge had a potato, of all things, and it’s a beaut.
- Celebrating Valerie Tuia, until recently genebank manager at SPC. Faberge taro, anyone?
- The Nigeria food database includes taro, but only leaves.
- The Digital atlas of traditional agricultural practices and food processing weighs 10kg, but seems a stone-cold Faberge-level masterpiece. Not sure if it has much on taro, though.
- “Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.”
Brainfood: Pennisetum genome, Dioscorea genome, CBS timeline, Global taro, Science storytelling, Fragmented populations, Beet diversity, Potato diversity, Norwegian chickens, Med holidays, ABS, Jatropha diversity, Better olive oil
- Pearl millet genome sequence provides a resource to improve agronomic traits in arid environments. Of course it does. Lots of genes for natural wax proteins may be part of the answer.
- Genome sequencing of the staple food crop white Guinea yam enables the development of a molecular marker for sex determination. Which should make breeding more efficient.
- Cassava brown streak disease: historical timeline, current knowledge and future prospects. Re-emergence drives intense scientific scrutiny, and maybe some solutions, including 25 best-bet clones from the region which show foliar symptoms but no tuber necrosis.
- Adapting clonally propagated crops to climatic changes: a global approach for taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott). People need taro diversity.
- Opinion: Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication. See all of the above.
- Call for a Paradigm Shift in the Genetic Management of Fragmented Populations. Mix it up!
- How scattered trees matter for biodiversity conservation in active pastures. By being diverse, and helping in forest recovery. Someone should mash up with the previous.
- Insights into the genetic relationships among plants of Beta section Beta using SNP markers. Fancy markers say same thing as less fancy markers.
- Levels of Intra-Specific AFLP diversity in Tuber-Bearing Potato Species with Different Breeding Systems and Ploidy Levels. One plant is enough for self-compatible species.
- Genetic diversity in five chicken lines from the Norwegian live poultry gene bank. Not much, globally speaking. But that’s not the whole point.
- Is It Still Necessary to Continue to Collect Crop Genetic Resources in the Mediterranean Area? A Case Study in Catalonia. Yes.
- Beyond access and benefit-sharing : lessons from the emergence and application of the principle of fair and equitable benefit-sharing in agrobiodiversity governance. It’s not yet working, maybe because it’s too complicated.
- Genetic Tracing of Jatropha curcas L. from Its Mesoamerican Origin to the World. Now we know where to go look for fixes to the low productivity problem of African and Asian material, which is all derived from a couple of accessions.
- Exploration of genetic resources to improve the functional quality of virgin olive oil. We need data on phenolic composition.