Information

October 24, 2007October 23, 2007

Ecosystems and Poverty

Our friend Andy Jarvis of Bioversity/CIAT is off and running with his blog on Ecosystems and Poverty. It’s part of the Ecosystems Services & Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) project. Your RSS feed is in our reader, Andy. Welcome to the blogosphere.

October 23, 2007March 31, 2008

King Corn

Here’s an interview with the makers of the documentary King Corn, which is partly about how maize “covers the food landscape,” as well as the actual landscape, in the US.

October 22, 2007October 22, 2007

US National Agricultural Library blog

This could be fun: InfoFarm is a blog at the US National Agricultural Library. via IAALD.

October 19, 2007

Teaching kids about fungi

Fungi4Schools.

October 18, 2007October 18, 2007

Crop books reviewed

More about food and farming from bookforum.com, including links to reviews of books on the history of citrus and of beans. Meanwhile, iafrica.com has features on the potato in history and the potato and politicsÂ to remind us that 2008 will be the International Year of the Potato.

1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Published on April 4, 2025