- Science for the People blog carnival is up, answering questions.
- How fashion turns the local glamorous, exotic and desirable — foods edition.
- Sub-1 rice gene takes over local varieties, changes nothing except flood tolerance.
- Rhizowen may be suffering from inadvertent introgression, in his yacon.
- New variety — just the one — resistant to coffee berry rust and leaf rust released in Kenya.
Viva the agrobiodiversity revolution
A final dispatch from the front lines of agrobiodiversity conservation and use. That is, the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes” at CATIE in Costa Rica.
The participants at the last day of the 6th Wallace Symposium shared a warm glow. The people who I chanced to talk to all raved about the conference. Although agrobiodiversity suffers from being a vague term, it has the attractive ability to bring together a crowd of scientists from worldwide institutes, who obviously see great relevance in each other’s research. Everyone can appreciate the needs of farmers for a suite of integrated and sustainable options, including biodiversity at all scales, to enable them to cope with markets, pests and diseases, soils, climate, and — maybe most importantly — changes.
CATIE is in a prime position to integrate options with its stronghold in forest and agroecology research, watershed management, enterprise development and its international collections of cacao, coffee, peach palm and many other crops. Dr Ronnie De Camino, CATIE’s Deputy Director, stressed to the audience that the drivers of change are not slowing down and our actions are too slow. What is needed is a revolution. After this conference, I will certainly be looking to CATIE and the Mesoamerican region to lead the way in this agrobiodiversity revolution.
Worthy of support?
Global Giving, mentioned yesterday as a possible source of funds, is running a Global Open Challenge: projects have 30 days in which to secure themselves a spot on Global Giving’s roster of projects. And there are 3 days left. So just for fun, I skimmed through 150 projects to find those that are directly connected with agriculture, ignoring some that might be borderline, such as nutrition projects. Here’s the list:
- Increase Family Income Of 50 Mexican Farmers.
- Moringa for Elimination Of Malnutrition Among Women & Children
- Biodiverse Agri Trainings To 1500 Youth Every Year
- Helping 30 Rural Malawi Women Through Pig Farming
- Improve Food Security To 1000 Households In Kenya
- Support 200 Ugandan Women To Learn Poultry Skills
- Bright Hope School Garden Project
- 10,000 Broilers As Microcredits To 100 Farmers
- Train 2000 Girls In Agricultural Skills In Imo
- A Sustainable Solution To Malnutrition In Cambodia
Personally, I wouldn’t support this last one, because it describes Moringa and amaranth as “super-foods”. They’re good, but to pin your hopes for “a long term solution to poverty, malnutrition & food insecurity” on two species — any two species — is to miss the point comprehensively.
Nibbles: Genebank, Guanaco, Maize, Wild food
- Maintaining a citrus gene bank. Just the book you need if you have to, er, maintain a citrus genebank.
- Guanacos need quiet.
- Don’t understand this piece on maize germplasm conservation and use.
- Indigenous food plants in trouble in the Philippines.
Nibbles: Heat, Pastoralism, Yams, Caimito, Pavlovsk, Beans, Tomatoes, Trees, Grasslands, Rice in LAC, Fossil sunflower, Apples, Fish in Africa
- Unpacking the heat of chillies.
- Debating pastoralism, a new journal.
- Celebrating (instead of growing?) yams.
- Economic Botany releases free download of paper on caimito domestication.
- More than 50,000 people care about Pavlovsk Experiment Station. Unstoppable?
- A bean diversity fair was held in Uganda on the 21st of June 2010. Did we miss it then?
- Searching for the Blue Zebra … tomato. Wonder if AVRDC know about it.
- Those blogging diplomats — How to make a scarf from a tree.
- Tibet’s disappearing grasslands. Pastoralists see item 2 above.
- IRRI DG says, in Latin America, that Latin America could be next global rice bowl. Well, he would, wouldn’t he. Very data-heavy presentation.
- One VERY remote sunflower wild relative. Very cool.
- Chaffey’s regular words of wisdom on anything botanical. Well, mostly wise. But more on that later…
- The history of the apple in the early US.
- IUCN does for African freshwater fish what it does best. Ring the alarm bell.