For those of you who were disappointed by the strange ending to that video about the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees at SPC in Fiji, the full version is now up.
Asian forest talkfest finally off the ground
The Forests Asia Summit 2014 starts today, with the usual panoply of social media accoutrements. Let’s get #forestasia trending, shall we? The landscape perspective seems to be to the fore, so there should be at least some dialogue with agriculture. You can let us know about it here, if you like.
Nibbles: Food future, Bean breeding 101, Yield gaps, Mitigation strategies, Sparing vs sharing, Diverse diets, Open seeds, Fake seeds, Florida citrus threat, Hot chicks, Nutrition nuggets
- Food? We don’t need no stinking food.
- Bean breeder begs to differ.
- Where we could do with more food.
- Nobody’s talking about mitigation any more. Oh yes they are.
- Land shparing is the answer.
- ICRAF decides to gather evidence for the benefits of agroforestry for nutrition.
- More on those open source seeds. Which I hope nobody will counterfeit.
- Florida needs new grapefruits, whether open source or not.
- Naked neck chickens look weird, but they may be really heat resistant, so get over it. Ghana has.
- Canadian grad students summarize nutrition research in a pithy sentence. Sound familiar?
Nibbles: Global plant cover, Veggies in Africa, Ancient middens, Raspberry fruit colour, Citrus greening, Jordan biodiversity, US nutrition, Subsidies, Seed and voucher fair, Bean diversity, Grape mildew fight
- GIS geeks sort out land cover at last.
- Role of vegetables in combating malnutrition in Africa. Author offers pdf of paper.
- Ancient native American middens just keep on giving.
- Raspberry colour good predictor of various fruit post-harvest characteristics. Good short-cut for breeders.
- Getting to the root of citrus greening. Scary disease.
- Freaky stuff about using frog eggs to figure out the genetics of grapevine’s susceptibility to another scary disease.
- Video of our friend Dr Nigel Maxted on Jordan’s socioeconomically important plants.
- Physician, heal thyself. Indian tells USAID to take care of its own food insecurity.
- How to create subsidies that promote biodiversity, in a model, which is probably highly unrealistic.
- Very realistic notes from a seed and voucher fair in Malawi.
- And anecdotes on the benefits of bean diversity in Uganda.
National Geographic and FAO share data and limelight
The next step of National Geographic’s eight-month series on food 1 seems to be to team up with FAO.
From May through December, FAO experts will provide perspective and data for National Geographic’s food coverage, which includes in-depth articles in the magazine each month and additional features on the NatGeoFood.com website. Both organizations will share content and participate in related events to help educate and promote awareness about hunger and nutrition.
The first such event is a panel discussion today — Food: A Forum — at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. But that’s not all:
The panel discussion will be followed by a two-day Future of Food Hackathon May 3 and 4, during which scientists, data journalists and programmers will develop apps and tools to address solutions for feeding the planet by exploring broad FAO data sets that shed light on food distribution, transportation, costs and environmental legacy over the last 50 years.
Will they talk to Colin Khoury of CIAT, whose recent paper on the globalization of diets was based on FAO data? 2 Would be interesting to know whether NatGeo’s plans for its food series include a bit more collaboration with CGIAR — that is, people like Colin — than the admittedly impressive photo essay on Finding the Faces of Farmers. Finding the Faces of CGIAR Genebankers, anyone?