- Today’s maybe we’ll get some coverage if we link it to hunger and famine press release. Petunia gene.
- Today’s there’s a database for that announcement. FAO’s Horticulture Cultivars Performance Database.
- Today’s impact of climate change on X report. Forest resources in the Caribbean.
- Today’s debunking a crappy piece of nutrition research killjoys. Experts respond to nutrition claims.
- The Archaeobotanist has been going great guns; new book on domestication and millet domestication. We’ll pass on the museum post till we can firm it up.
- IFPRI says let two flowers bloom. Here’s the super-groovy new policy kid on the block for non-policy wonks.
- I’ll see your evil speculators and raise you a rising secular trend in food prices. (See what I did there?)
- With a heavy clunk, The Economist gave Svalbard’s Doomsday Seed Vault a fine 4th birthday present.
International Women’s Day
Just in case we didn’t get anything done ourselves, here’s a little something from Farming First and FAO.
Nibbles: Eyzaguirre speaks, Hunger, India in Africa, Aquaculture, Mutation breeding, Climate info, Micronutrients, Peanuts, Crops from space, CIMMYT in Africa, Cassava beer, Heirloom onion, Coffee research, Newton’s apple, Gastronomica
- An anthropologists speaks about landscapes.
- ILRI says: “Landscapes, I’ve got your landscapes right here.”
- India makes its play for African agricultural landscapes. I hope there will be scorecards and women. And access to Indian genebank holdings…
- Will there be fish though?
- And will India be pushing its mutation-bred varieties in Africa? Not that there’s anything wrong with them.
- Or using climate information?
- Or mining technology for that matter.
- Surely there will be dual-purpose groundnuts.
- Doesn’t India have a satellite?
Meanwhile, CIMMYT is making its own African play. Maybe some of the stuff it is doing there could be useful in India too?Two dead linksAfrica could teach India some other stuff too.Dead link.- Pretty sure this nearly-extinct-onion-rescued story is totally irrelevant to both India and Africa.
- Unlike coffee research.
- I don’t suppose I can interest anyone in a not very nice tasting, disease-prone but historical apple?
- And speaking of historical connections… Well that was quite a journey.
Ag day on Women’s day, or vice versa
You couldn’t make this up.
The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center has just reproduced an announcement about Ag Day 2012, which will take place on 8 March. As it so happens, that day is also International Women’s Day. What a great opportunity, then, to celebrate the huge contribution that women around the world make to growing food, nourishing their families, and selling their surplus to others. Does Ag Day offer any of that? Does it heck. Will we be able to do any better? That depends.
Nibbles: African seeds, African needs, Egyptian seed preservation, Archaeocandy, Conservation, Seed swap site, Water buffalo genome, Anti-striga films, Entomophagy, Black sigatoka, Pavlovsk, Cannabis genome
- Gates just gave AGRA $56 million to make new seed varieties available. PASS still not collecting the diversity it hopes to displace.
- Hang on though. Africa needs a “Green renaissance, not revolution”.
- Saving seeds the ancient Egyptian way.
- Eating sweets the ancient Papuan (and others) way.
- Odd to hear an agrobiodiversity dude talking about silver bullets – even with a question mark.
- SeedZoo site offers a space to give and to receive “traditional and indigenous food plants from around the world”.
- Today’s forthcoming genome of agricultural interest: water buffalo.
- Farmer to farmer films – gender sensitive, natch – “fight against striga”.
- Assessing the Potential of Insects as Food and Feed in assuring Food Security, from the FAO document repository.
- Much sound, less light, on black Sigatoka disease, from the BBC (natch).
- Vaviblog rounds up the latest skinny on Pavlovsk.
- And speaking of Vavilov, the latest genome to be sequenced has a VIR connection.