- Dinka men despise manual labour, hence “southern Sudan might soon be on the block for having a lot of its potential farm land leased to, and worked by, foreigners”.
- Maasai, on the other hand, “diversifying into cropping, by keeping fewer and faster growing animals and … taking on paying jobs”. Takes all sorts.
- What is a small farm? Depends.
- Coffee contains insecticides. Who knew?
- Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) launched.
- Central America’s coffee lands to shrink under climate change, Reuters reports. Enough! I’ve got the shakes.
- Africa, meanwhile, needs technological innovations to cope.
- Domesticating baobab. You know it makes sense.
- Take two snacks in the morning and call me if you don’t feel any better.
- Climate change will affect Portuguese ex situ plant conservation sites too.
- “How best can communities conserve their medicinal plants?” A case study from China.
- Bolivia could make more of its Araceae and Bromeliaceae. Couldn’t we all?
- Are protected areas in Africa harbouring crop wild relatives? Just kidding: it’s invasives IUCN is talking about.
International Day for Biodiversity in Nairobi
If you’re in Nairobi, Kenya, next Saturday 22 May and you feel like celebrating the UN’s International Day for Biodiversity in this, the UN’s International Year for Biodiversity, you could do worse than pop along to the National Museum of Kenya’s Louis Leakey Auditorium for the first Nairobi Agrobiodiversity Debate. Kick off is at 11.30 a.m., and this is what you can expect, according to the organizer’s website:
Hans R Herren, an internationally recognized scientist and current president of the Millennium Institute (Washington, D.C., USA), will be the key note speaker. Hans’s fellow panelists will include Professor Steven Gichuki, Dean, School of Environmental Studies Kenyatta University and Patrick Maundu, an Ethnobotanist with National Museums of Kenya and Honorary Research Fellow with Bioversity International (Kenya and Dr Balakhrishna Pisupati from UNEP along with a few more special guests. The Nairobi Agrobiodiversity Debates will be moderated by our very own Dr Toby Hodgkin, Coordinator of the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research and Principal Scientist with Bioversity International (Italy).
We’ll gratefully accept any first-hand reports.
Nibbles: African success, Tef biotech, Hybrid rice, Livestock data, Wine grapes, Uphoff on SRI, Blog Carnival
- There are some African success stories, and a few even have to do with agriculture.
- TILLING tef.
- Some farmers’ groups in Asia don’t like hybrid rice. But some do, presumably. How come we never hear from those?
- Livestock trends deconstructed.
- The mother of all grapevine varieties found. Well, some varieties anyway.
- One of the foremost supporters of the System of Rice Intensification interviewed.
- Scientia Pro Publica, latest edition. There’s some nutrition stuff.
Mango madness
What is it with mangoes? One glorious post about the mother of all mangoes and suddenly they’re everywhere. Case in point. Visiting friends kindly brought me a jar of mango chutney. Fair enough, and much appreciated. But look closely at the label.
How many shoppers at Sainsbury are even aware that there are different varieties of mango? And do they, like me, rush to the interwebs to discover, for example, that Malda comes from around Malda in West Bengal, and that just last week there were further reports of urban development cutting into Malda mango plantations in Digha.? Search for Totapuri mango, by contrast, and you get lots of listings of people who want to sell you processed pulp. 1 I’m betting, then, that Sainsbury’s finest is mostly Totapuri with a smidgen of Malda thrown in. But I’m willing to be corrected. Not that there’s much real estate left on the label to do so.
Nibbles: Poppies, Breeding, American panmixis, Hemp, Bra, AnGR
- Breeders called on to save key Afghani crop. No, not really.
- GMOs not incompatible with organic, round 2.
- The Columbian Exchange. People though, not crops.
- USDA chief botanist was into Cannabis shock.
- Novel way of growing rice unveiled.
- Two livestock pdfs: What 2010 means for farm animal genetic resources conservation. And a book on European local breeds.