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CWR at Kew celebrations

Nigel Maxted has just sent a brief personal take on the recent Kew 250th anniversary celebrations to the Crop Wild Relatives discussion group. Here’s a snippet:

Personally I felt the audience was very receptive to the use and need for CWR conservation, but in my view far too many talks outside of the Plant conservation and agriculture session still failed to make the link between conservation and use. I would judge the gulf between the biodiversity and PGR sectors is still a problem that we need to address if we are to have ‘joined-up’ conservation of all biodiversity.

You can download Nigel’s presentation, “A global approach to crop wild relative conservation: Securing our food and agriculture gene pool.” But watch out, it’s a big PowerPoint file.

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Agrobiodiversity on display at SIRGEALC

One of the pleasures of going to SIRGEALC is looking at the posters. I especially like the ones which feature photographs of agrobiodiversity along with the required graphs and tables. Here are some impressions: Opuntia and tomatoes from Mexico, potatoes from Peru and chickens from Chile.

posters

One of the themes of the meeting was the development of lesser-known native agrobiodiversity, especially fruits. Here’s an example of value-adding and marketing of native fruits from the prize-winning agro-ecotourism project in Cotacachi, Ecuador, about which we’ve blogged before.

uvilla

In fact, Physalis seems to be a really up-and-coming fruit in its native continent. It was also on sale in dry form in Chile (along with other, more familiar, fruits).

fruit