Ethan Zuckerman puts the e- in e-agriculture

Ethan Zuckerman is a well-respected internet guru. He’s got a blog, called My Heart’s in Accra, on which he muses “on Africa, international development and hacking the media.” He was recently at the Web2forDev conference here in Rome, the centrepiece of e-Agriculture week, where he

participated in a very strange panel on eAgriculture, where the main topic of conversation seemed to be the fact that none of the panelists quite knew what eAgriculture was or should be.

That’s from a blog entry with a definite agrobiodiversity vibe, talking as it does about recent innovative solutions to the problem of providing up-to-date price information on commodities to Ethiopian farmers, for example via SMS. Thanks to Kevin for the tip.

Hot news from CAPRi

No, that’s not a typo. CAPRi is the CGIAR system-wide program on Collective Action and Property Rights. A little more than a year ago CAPRi organized a workshop on Collective Action and Market Access for Smallholders. Now the papers from that meeting are available online. Two that might be of particular interest to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog readers are:

CAPRi Working Paper No. 69: Collective Action and Marketing of Underutilized Plant Species: The Case of Minor Millets in Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu, India, by Guillaume P. Gruère, Latha Nagarajan, and E.D.I. Oliver King

and

CAPRi Working Paper No. 70: The Role of Public-Private Partnerships and Collective Action in Ensuring Smallholder Participation in High Value Fruit and Vegetable Supply Chains, by Clare Narrod, Devesh Roy, Julius Okello, Belem Avendaño, Karl Rich