The International Scientific Symposium Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets: United Against Hunger, on until tomorrow at FAO in Rome, is streaming live. Mainly in English. Read a precis of yesterday’s session over at Bioversity.
Climate change, agriculture and web 2.0
A new website to do with agriculture and climate change for you to explore: Climate-Smart Agriculture from FAO. Basically just a static selection of case studies, but interesting for all that, and maybe it will evolve into something a little more interactive. The Challenge Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has a blog if you’re into the whole web 2.0 experience thing.
Nibbles: PNG & CC, Pasture, Nagoya, Sesame, CIMMYT, Oryza, Tradition
- A view from Papua New Guinea on a project to prepare PNG agriculture for climate change.
- How to grow a properly biodiverse pasture. Hint: money isn’t enough.
- Another Nagoya round-up. And another.
- Sesamum monographed.
- Award for CIMMYT genebank.
- African rice domestication deconstructed.
- Traditional practices bad for Nigerian children, good for Chinese fish.
Innovation in African farming
From the JSTOR plant science blog, a link to a fascinating site called AfriGadget, which showcases ideas that solve “everyday problems with African ingenuity”. There are some wonderful ideas in there, from the farmer that reversed one of his ploughshares in order to capture water, to a simple seed planting gizmo made in northern Ghana. And, of course, keyhole gardens and other approaches to better nutrition. Definitely an inspirational one for the RSS feed.
Nibbles: Livestock system resilience, Nepal genebank, Salicornia, GMO risk
- ILRI slideshow on adapting South Asian livestock systems to climate change. And some background.
- Latest on Nepal’s new genebank.
- Salicornia 101.
- GENERA: a database of published, peer-reviewed scientific papers that are related to the risks and safety of genetic engineering in agriculture. Courtesy of Biofortified.