Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The latest issue of PGR Newsletter, published by Bioversity International and FAO, is available online. It includes a tribute to Professor Jack Hawkes, a towering figure in the history of agricultural biodiversity, and much else of potential interest.
NOTE: The links on this post were updated on 23 June 2015 to reflect a new arrangement for the hosting of the PGR Newsletter.
India is to build a national biodiversity information system. Will it include agricultural biodiversity? Not clear from the short article in The Hindu, but I hope to be surprised. The National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources does have relevant databases (though not all online yet)…
Happy Birthday Oekologie. The 13th edition of this monthly blog carnival is up and running, with lots of posts that should tickle the fancy of anyone interested in agriculture and our food supply: worm compost, overfishing, links between food and culture. Oh, and us.
Yes, it is back … and after only one extra week of waiting (which sped by thanks to holiday sloth). Tangled Bank 96 is up at aardvarchaeology with a New Year’s helping of good biological blogging. And we’re in, under climate change, which is fine, because as any fule kno agriculture is not biology. Alas, there really is very little this time of an agro/eco bent, but there’s still a lot worth reading. And if you’ve just landed from there, looking for some hard-rocking biology, there’s some of that here too. I think.
A friend alerted me to the Ask Force, hosted at something called the Public Research and Regulation Initiative. According to the site, “On this ‘ASK-FORCE’ page, PRRI publishes frequently asked questions that refer to publications that are either not supported by properly peer reviewed scientific research.” Breathless with excitement, we hurried to the section on agriculture. What a terrific list of topics, to whit:
- Biofuels: what will the positive and negative impact be?
- Is co-existence between organic farming and GM crops possible
- Will GM crops end small scale farming?
- Did GM Crops cause health problems for the farmers?
- Were the Indian farmers committing suicide because of GM crops?
- Are GM crops are less well adapted to the local environment than local landraces?
- Are GM crops an economic desaster?
- Do GM crops cause higher pesticide and herbicide usage?
- Do GM crops cause new pests?
- Does GM crop planting create super weeds?
- Do GM crops decrease the yields?
Alas, the answers to these frequently asked questions remain “under development”. Like you, dear readers, I’d be delighted to read those answers. But there’s no RSS feed, and I’ll be blowed if I am going to return to the site every day to check. A word to the wise, Emeritus Professor Klaus Ammann: get a feed.
I noticed later that one can get a feed from a bulletin board hosted by the European Federation of Biotechnology, which raises another question. Why duplicate the content?