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April 7, 2011April 7, 2011

Spoiled by choice: Food crisis or malnutrition?

Cancel any plans you may have for Thursday and Friday next week.

Starting at noon GMT on Thursday 14 April, the World Bank hosts a “global chat forum about the food crisis.” A quarter of an hour later, a hop, skip and jump away at the International Food Policy Research Institute, there’s a seminar on Prospects for Golden Rice under the rubric Leveraging Agriculture to Improve Human Nutrition. You can watch the IFPRI seminar as a live webcast, which should end at 17:45 GMT. Luckily the global chat forum is, at least as far as I can tell, scheduled to continue for 24 hours, so you may not miss too much. (You can always follow the Twitter hashtags #foodcrisis and #wblive.) And if you’re not too exhausted, there’ll be a live webcast of World Bank assembled experts discussing ideas submitted by the public starting at 14:00 GMT on Friday 15 April.

April 7, 2011April 7, 2011

Nibbles: Barley genetics, CCAFS, VIR, Gardens of Adonis, Traditional Knowledge, Safety duplication, Wild pig,

10MB worth of proceedings of the Barley Genetics Symposium from ICARDA.
So, what will this CCAFS do anyway?
Russia offers VIR to the world. Again.
Adonis, Sappho and lettuce, all in one post.
Modern science needs traditional knowledge. And a fish needs a bicycle.
Global Crop Diversity Trust and Latin American genebanks team up to rescue another bunch of crops: coffee, tomatoes, chillies, beans, squash etc.
The world’s smallest and rarest wild suid is cute enough, not as cute as pocket pigs.

April 7, 2011

Serving, protecting, blogging

Our more skeptical readers will probably dispute it, but that’s a shot of this esteemed organ being publicized at the European Plant Genetic Resources Conference 2011, organized by Eucarpia, taking place in Wageningen as I write. ¹ Apparently, the massed ranks of genebankers present were encouraged to blog away, echoing our recent exhortation to that effect. Welcome, everyone!

April 7, 2011April 6, 2011

Tools for manipulators

Luigi is the data massage king around these parts, no doubt about it. So he’ll surely be pleased to see this quick round-up from the Global Health Metrics and Evaluation conference, 2011. Why? Because it offers new opportunities that I can barely begin to make sense of, not least a tool called Tableau Public, “a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web”. I took a quick gander, searching for some of my favourite terms. Alas, there isn’t a whole lot up there, except for this nifty look at the productivity of dairy cows in Wisconsin and yet another look at diabetes, poverty and obesity, which is awesomely interactive, but I’m sure that’ll change once Luigi gets his mitts on it. Maybe we could even find out whether life expectancy is related to percent of income spent on food.

April 6, 2011April 6, 2011

Mapping aid

Thanks to CIAT’s Meike for news that

InterAction has just launched an interactive US Food Security Aid Map that provides detailed project-level information on food security and agriculture work being done by their member NGOs. The site can be browsed by location, sector, organization or project.

Here’s the map of agriculture projects: ²

As coincidence would have it, one of the projects is the orange-fleshed sweet potato work we mentioned in a recent post.

Searching on “agrobiodiversity” yielded nothing, but there were a few hits with “diversification.” Well worth exploring in a bit more detail. If only to identify places where some pre-emptive germplasm collecting might be in order.