SIRGEALC ended on Friday with a call for the establishment of a Latin American Society for Genetic Resources. Similar things have been suggested before, to no avail. The SAT21 conference recommended that an international society be set up, for example. That was seven years ago and I don´t think there´s been much talk about it since. What do you think? Do we need another scientific society?
Credit where credit is due
The latest Oekologie carnival is up over at 10,000 birds, and I’m here to state that although I submitted the article featured, I did not, as Mike suggests, write it. That was Jacob van Etten, and I hope he’ll submit another guest post soon.
The Oekologie carnival has its usual fascinating bunch of links to stories of potential interest. One in particular that took my fancy was an account of water wars in the south. The south of the United States, that is, where you would think that they would be better prepared. They’re not. As Jennifer at The Infinite Sphere writes:
As a result of the merging of a bad drought, a population explosion in the Atlanta metro area, a lack of planning to accompany said population explosion, lack of any kind of plan to deal with a severe drought, and pretty much no water conservation incentives at a state or local level. As a result, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida are now duking it out over a watershed (Chattahoochee/ Flint/ Apalachicola Rivers) spread over the three states. It’s gotten so bad that the Georgia aquarium, home to the largest aquarium tank in the country, has drained several aquariums to save water (I would assume the water is now being used for some beneficial purpose).
Phew! There’s not a whole heap in there directly about farming, but it does indicate just how complex water management can be.
Breadfruit proceedings
Great news from Diane Ragone. The proceedings of the I International Symposium on Breadfruit Research and Development are out!
Latin America cooperates on (some) information
I just got the book (plus CD) containing the abstracts of the papers to be delivered here in Mexico at the 6th SIRGEALC, and there’s lots of great stuff. Unfortunately the abstracts are not online, although the programme is. That’s a pity. I’ll try to find out whether there are any plans to put them up later on. There was a lot of talk today within and among the various regional plant genetic resources networks in the Americas, which are having their annual meetings just prior to SIRGEALC at the same venue, about information systems. We still do not have a system for sharing online data on plant genetic resources accessions in genebanks. We’re trying to do something about that, but, as I concidentally found out today  from a SciDevNet story, the herbarium people are way ahead of us.
Free rice
From our friends at the Lubin Library, news of a way to have fun, gain bragging rights, and do good. Go to Free Rice and tell the web site what words mean. The web site says they’ll send rice to hungry people, 10 grains per word. I hope they do, because I’m a naive, trusting type of guy.
As for the bragging, I just donated 400 grains of rice, guessed “santori” correctly, have learned the true meaning of “demimonde,” which I have been misusing, and drew stumps at “chaffer.”
Go. Do better. Comment here.
Nothing to do with agrobiodiversity (mind you, they don’t say what kind of rice, or rices …) but some things are worth noting even so.