Need a soil map? Hat tip: The Lubin Files.
Agrobiodiversity in China
Back now from Kunming and Beijing, I discover that there is a rather massive Sino-German collaboration on Sustainable Management of Agrobiodiversity. It apparently runs from June 2005 to May 2009, and is certainly casting its net wide in both Hunan and the island province of Hainan. The project web site is rather neat, although I personally found the content just a little confusing. It is hard to get a sense of timing, and the use of acronyms is downright confusing. I clicked on PVP Training in Hunan Province Successfully Held fully expecting it to be about plant variety protection, only to discover it was about participatory village planning. Still, that’s minor. There’s plenty to explore and I’m sure the project will have an impact. Now, if only I can persuade the project to establish an RSS feed and to change the name of one of the organisations the web site links to, I’ll be even happier.
p.s. Just to pull all my recent posts from China together (just in case someone somewhere is Googling “china agrobiodiversity”) here they are:
World Development special issue
Historical food information
Weird how just a couple of days after I blogged about current African foodways, The Lubin Files at FAO points me to a wonderful website about the past eating habits of various East African countries. This was put together by Verena Raschke, who at the time was completing a PhD jointly at University of Vienna (Austria) and Monash University (Australia).
[Her] project is based on a precious and unique collection of literature and data from East Africa from the 1930s to the 1960s.
…
These unpublished data have been stored at the Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food Location Karlsruhe (Germany) for the last 30 years, after the Max Planck Nutrition Research Unit in Tanzania (East Africa) was shut down in the late1970s.
The material is called the Oltersdorf Collection, and it is a veritable treasure trove of historical information on crops, food and nutrition.
Natura morta
From EurekAlert: “The American Society for Horticultural Science has published multimedia podcast files of 98 horticulture presentations from the 2007 Annual Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.” Check out, in particular, James Nienhuis of the University of Wisconsin, Dept. of Horticulture, talking about Renaissance art and agrobiodiversity, more specifically vegetable domestication. Wonderful stuff.