Category: Information

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Scaling up everything except communications

Scale is very much on the agenda today in Africa, though a little bit under the radar, for some reason. We’ve seen no advance publicity, for example, for the launching of the the African Plant Breeding Academy by the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC). We were insufficiently attentive, no doubt. Here’s the press release. And you can follow the proceedings live from the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. There is also tweeting:

You’ll remember that the African Orphan Crops Consortium plans to use next-generation technologies to sequence dozens of heretofore neglected crops and use the resulting megadata to improve them. Good luck to them.

Meanwhile, a little further north, another CGIAR Centre is hosting a meeting of Feed the Future’s Agriculture & Nutrition Global Learning and Evidence Exchange, a meeting which is apparently focusing on scaling up technology adoption. I found out about it via the redoubtable comms people at ILRI:

But further information is very scarce. Maybe a participant will fill us in. In particular, of course, we’d be very interested in what is being said about the use of agricultural biodiversity in scaling up nutrition interventions.

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Nibbles: ICRISAT award, SIRGEALC awards, Food etymology, Black carrot, Bolivian potatoes, NASA weirdness, Mexican maize, Rice 2.0, Vaccinium

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You say Kartoffel

photo (3)Let’s be fair. The inability to distinguish the potato from other Andean roots and tubers is not entirely confined to National Geographic. Take, for example, the November 2013 edition of the German magazine P.M. History. I don’t think it is online, but there’s an article in there entitled “Eine kleine Knolle verändert die Welt,” or “A small tuber that changed the world.” The first couple of pages are reproduced here. Clearly, it’s about the potato.

photo (4)Ah, but wait, for a little further on one comes across a photo of what are clearly not potatoes. Unless of course all is explained in the caption, but somehow I doubt it.

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Nibbles: Papaya relatives, Agrobiodiversity monitoring, Orange breeding, Corn mutant, Cashew processing, Pecan pie, Communications history, Wheat research video, Agroforestry, Breeding, AG research in USA, Philippines typhoon, Eating insects, Indian blog, Open data, Microbes & wine, European databases, Afro-Indian Millet Alliance

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Breadfruit Institute on a roll

They’ve been busy at the Breadfruit Institute of late. Or even more busy than usual. The director, Dr Diane Ragone, has won one of the prestigious “Star of Oceania” awards, which this year recognize

…women of and from Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and the state of Hawaii who reaffirm the capacity of women to serve, lead and inspire regionally, nationally and globally through aloha, courage, perseverance, precedence and faith.

The final version of the breadfruit climate suitability map is also now online, according to a post on the Institute’s Facebook page. Here it is:

breadfruit map

I’m not sure if we already blogged about this, but that map reminds me that WRI has a set of global water stress maps online now. Here it is for coffee.

coffee

Maybe one for breadfruit could be added sometime? Anyway, as if that weren’t enough, Diane has also put online various materials in support of a “Breadfruit and You” curriculum, including a nifty new graphic of breadfruit diversity and local names.

breadfruit

Our congratulations to Diane, for all of the above!

LATER: And breadfruit is not just good to eat, we also learned.