- What civil society said at the latest Governing Body meeting of the ITPGRFA earlier this month.
- Google Translate fail puts spotlight on the cruciferous crop I’ve always known as fiarielli but which is sometimes called rapini. Both names kinda suck.
- That’s one huge tomato.
- That’s one expensive spice.
- Rediscovering enset.
- Grassland biodiversity good for resilience to climate change.
- Global agriculture: here comes the data.
- Deconstructing organic. The word, that is.
- Empowering dalit farmers by recognizing their knowledge of seeds.
- That ancient underwater wheat DNA wasn’t so ancient after all. Maybe.
- It was migrants who forced the ancestors of the Pueblo people to move.
- Local adaptation in trees: what has it ever done for us?
- Another way to safeguard Syrian crop diversity.
The magic of Svalbard
A short distance from the North Pole, there is a Norwegian island called Spitsbergen. On this remote piece of dry land in the very boreal archipelago of Svalbard is the Global Seed Vault, the world’s underground seed store. Within the concrete walls of a warehouse built to withstand even a nuclear war are endangered seeds from around the world. Among them, until four years ago, there were 40 ancient black Peruvian corn grains that a student of agronomy from Cremona — only 16 years old — has now seen fit to make the cornerstone of his company: the agricultural startup of Carlo Maria Recchia.
That sounds easy enough, but Carlo Maria, selected by Coldiretti Giovani as one of Italy’s the most promising young farmers, had to insist to get those seeds, and not a little either. First, with his school, and then through the Ministry of Agriculture. “Then I spent two years multiplying the seeds so I could start to farm,” Carlo told The Food Makers. “Today I produce beer, biscuits, flour, and breadsticks and other products are coming.”
That’s my translation of a piece on StartUpItalia!. Which, yes, I’m afraid insists on the exclamation mark. And, yes, which I’m afraid is utter tosh.
Because there is just no way on earth that Carlo Maria got those black Peruvian maize seeds from Svalbard, Italian Ministry of Agriculture or no Italian Ministry of Agriculture. Only organizations that have deposited seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can withdraw them, and then only the ones they deposited. And only one organization has ever asked for its seeds back, just a few weeks ago. Making seeds of black Peruvian maize available to random farmers — no matter how young and promising — is just not what Svalbard does.
So I don’t know where Carlo Maria got his seeds. But I can guarantee that it wasn’t Svalbard. Genesys says there are 27 maize accessions from Peru with dark seeds, from the USDA collection. Maybe he got them from there, or from CIMMYT, and given that a lot of that material is safety duplicated in Svalbard, figured he would try to have a little of the stardust rub off on him.
Whatever. I wish him luck, the kid will probably go far. In politics if not farming.
Nibbles: Seed Hunter, Corn Palace, Rice domestication, Solomons cocoa, Simran Sethi book, Cucurbit diseases, Brazilian foodies, Ananas genome, GMOs in Argentina
- Seed Hunter visits genebank. Not many people hurt.
- I’d like to visit this Corn Palace.
- Rice domestication: not once, not twice, three times. Well, really, who’s to say maybe even more than that? Maybe even in Australia?
- Solomon Islands cacao wins award. Looking forward to tasting it one day. But is it certified?
- Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Giveaway.
- Researchers hoping to science the shit out of threat to Thanksgiving.
- Genetic resources and gastronomy in Brazil.
- Pineapple gets a genome.
- Sunflower saves soybean? What wizardry is this?
A periplus to the geography of food
This Article Selection has been created in order to highlight some of the huge body of research on the topic of Food across Geography, Planning and Development journals. In recent years, we have published an increasing number of articles on this topic, from a very wide range of perspectives, and interest continues to grow today.
Great idea from Elsevier.
Nibbles: Data
- GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, wants your help to improve its agrobiodiversity-related data.