Category: Information

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Development Marketplace

The World Bank’s Development Marketplace opens its doors on Tuesday 10 November. The idea is “to identify 20 to 25 innovative, early-stage projects addressing climate adaptation” and support them with grants of up to USD 200,000.

You may remember that last year our friend Hannes Dempewolf was one of the winners. 1 Is there anything this year of interest to agricultural biodiversity? Hard to say, mostly because the list of 100 finalists is available only as a PDF and doesn’t give a whole heap of information, but on past form, there’s bound to be. The Development Marketplace blog may be the place to follow the action, and if you’re around the World Bank, and have registered at the Marketplace’s web site, why not visit and send us your predictions of likely winners?

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Agricultural biodiversity at the Diversitas conference

Harry Biggs, of South African National Parks, was at the recent Diversitas conference in Cape Town, and summarized his impressions on the conference web site: What I learnt from the Diversitas conference.. The stuff we wanted to hear:

Achim Steiner (now Exec Director UNEP) spent his keynote talking about how development and conservation have to, and can, find constructive mutuality. He is concerned that much of the renewed development drive is actually re-initiating old formulae which are not sustainable. At the meeting there was considerable emphasis on appropriate agro-biodiversity and dove-tailing of needs. He also feels that as a community we still see climate change (whatever we think about it) as a hindrance or competitive force to our agenda, rather than as an opportunity.

Here’s Steiner’s speech. Was anyone else listening?

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Mo’ better tuber news

Apropos Rhizowen’s hymn to “the connection between a convolvulaceous bearing crop, a folk-blues artist and a cetacean” which we nibbled a couple of days ago, news of further consternation in the tuberous ranks. The National Agricultural Library of the USDA, no less, riffs on a poem called Yam, by Ted Kooser. 2 Mary Ann Leonard uses it to sort her sweet potatoes from her yams, and both from Irish potatoes, which we all know aren’t from Ireland. Fun.

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Geo mashup artist needed

Luigi mentioned the UK Science’s Museum’s interactive map on climate change and crops. Elsewhere, 3 he draws attention to maps of diabetes around the world. Now I find a map of “small farms” in the US.

What I want, obviously, is a graphic that will show me any relationships between the prevalence of small farms and diabetes, over time, corrected for access to the internet, obviously, and for the whole world. Not a lot to ask, is it? Oh, and I can’t find diabetes at Gapminder World.

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How to breed for the future

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…

…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.

What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.