- Boffins discuss potatoes in Cuzco. The media are duly alerted.
- Dominique Guillet (M. Kokopelli) offers his French history of the EU Common Catalogue. Jeremy comments: “You translate it, we’ll post it”.
- Tanzanian women making money from tree diversity.
- “UK committed to Ghanaian cocoa farmers.” And to cacao diversity?
- Yams in trouble in Nigeria. Make that foufou to go.
Nibbles: Aromatics, local food, rice, trade, cetriolo mate, maize, sweet potato, media
- The International Symposium on Aromatic and Medicinal Plants, 3-6 November 2008 in Noumea, New Caledonia. Anyone interested in live blogging it for us? He asked, to thunderous silence.
- Modern Forager on the traditional diets of some funky places.
- IRRI flickrs rice photos. Another day, another neologism. Via.
- The lengths people will go to exchange agrobiodiversity. Sorry, I have a thing about maps of trade routes. Via.
- Australian woman adopts Italian cucumber.
- Corn domesticated even earlier in Ecuador.
- Sweet potato may have got to the Pacific islands by chance.
- The truth about those hipster farmers; “it must be true, I read it in the paper”.
Follow your tree in Google Earth
I agree with Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog: it is a really good idea. You go to mybabytree.org, pay $5.50, and WWF plants a tree (you have a choice of 3 species) for you in Sebangau National Forest in Kalimantan, Indonesia, and sends you a KML file of its location. How about doing the same for heirloom varieties of fruit trees or something?
Potato museums
So there’s an Idaho Potato Museum. I found out because four local worthies have just been nominated to its Hall of Fame. It seems a fun enough place, but definitely somewhat more parochial than the Potato Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. NPR did a piece on this latter outfit earlier this year, what with it being the International Year etc etc.
Recommendations of the Underutilized Plants Symposium
This just in from Hannah Jaenicke, Director of the International Centre for Underutilized Crops (ICUC):
Over 200 delegates from 55 countries gathered in Arusha, Tanzania 3-7 March 2008 for an International Symposium on “Underutilized plant species for food, nutrition, income and sustainable development”. The Symposium was co-convened under the umbrella of the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS) by the International Centre for Underutilised Crops (ICUC) with the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species, Bioversity International, GlobalHort, Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, and the World Vegetable Center, whose Regional Center for Africa was the local host.
The symposium was a resounding approval of the need for a working group on underutilized plant species to provide a voice to those who are working on these plants. The delegates endorsed the International Society for Horticultural Sciences’ working group on underutilized plants, which is co-chaired by Dr Hannah Jaenicke of the International Centre for Underutilised Crops (ICUC) and Dr Irmgard Hoeschle-Zeledon of the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species (GFU), and filled it with life and suggestions for future collaboration on research and development projects. A report will be published and circulated in the near future.
Following three days of over 150 scientific presentations, the participants developed a series of recommendations around four pertinent issues.
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