- What does the ‘closed herd’ really mean for Australian breeding companies and their customers? Australia has enough pig diversity to be going on with.
- Crossbreeding East African Highland Bananas: Lessons Learnt Relevant to the Botany of the Crop After 21 Years of Genetic Enhancement. Not completely sterile, but hardly very fertile either. Hard row to hoe.
- Are we eating the world’s megafauna to extinction? Yes.
- A systematic map of evidence on the contribution of forests to poverty alleviation. Always like a map.
- Turismo Rural y Conservación Ambiental: La Participación de la Mujer Campesina en la Reserva de la Biosfera los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico. It would be a good idea.
- Not even wrong: The spurious measurement of biodiversity’s effects on ecosystem functioning. Biodiversity likely not as important for ecosystem productivity as previously thought, because maths.
- Evolution of SSR diversity from wild types to U.S. advanced cultivars in the Andean and Mesoamerican domestications of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Some base-broadening may be called for.
- Comparison of Methods to Distinguish Diploid and Tetraploid Potato in Applied Diploid Breeding. Count chloroplasts.
- Phenotyping Whole Forests Will Help to Track Genetic Performance. You heard.
- Signatures of positive selection in African Butana and Kenana dairy zebu cattle. Adapted to marginal environments, but with potential for higher milk production.
- How cultivating wild plants in botanic gardens can change their genetic and phenotypic status and what it means for their conservation value. In the end, it’s a numbers game.
- Genetic Resources of Capsicum. Could use more wild relatives, more.
- Vanilla bahiana, a contribution from the Atlantic Forest biodiversity for the production of vanilla: A proteomic approach through high-definition nanoLC/MS. But does it taste the same?
- Spontaneous hybridisation within Aegilops collection and biobanking of crop wild relatives (CWR). I guess that’s bad. But could it be useful?
Nibbles: Fox burials, Myammar genebank, Wild rice, Community genebanks, Breeding cowpeas & EAH bananas, Doherty pics, Pulque ecotourism, Tree diversity maps, Horizontal genes, Polish hop breeding
- Did ancient Iberians domesticate foxes?
- Myanmar genebank staff receive training in Australia.
- Why genebanks are important. Though not so much for wild rice. No, not that wild rice, we’re talking Zizania here.
- Genebanks can be community-friendly.
- Improving cowpea and banana. Need genebanks for that.
- Picturing genebanks.
- Drinking for conservation.
- Mapping tree diversity.
- Some grasses steal genes from neighbours.
- Polish hops for Polish beer.
Nibbles: Heirlooms double, Seed huntress, Sequencing, ABS
Nibbles: Cherokee genebank, Community genebanks, Fruit genebank, CGIAR genebanks, CWR pre-breeding, Ethiopian sacred groves, UK animal ark
- Cherokee Nation seedbank goes online.
- Does that mean it is a biodiversity eden?
- New Grewia genebank in India. No word on community involvement.
- Meanwhile, at the CGIAR genebanks…
- Pre-breeding using CWR, some even from genebanks: finger millet, eggplant.
- Yeah, yeah, it’s not just about genebanks.
- Or maybe it is.
High on the hog
While this study has focused on the internal dynamics, it is important to note that China’s contemporary pork industry relies on – and is altering – global resources and markets. With 21 per cent of the world’s population but only 9 per cent of arable land, feeding China’s pigs without starving China’s people has required re-routing international trade, investment and resource flows. In 2014, China imported almost 60 per cent of the total global soybean trade (70 million tonnes) for its livestock feed industry; maize imports are also rising, and the party-state increasingly supports Chinese agribusiness firms to ‘go out’ (zou chuqu) to seek access to land, resources and markets abroad. In terms of ramping up pork production while avoiding widespread hunger, the development model has been successful: although food security remains a focus for the state (and a problem especially for poor rural populations), for those who can afford it, modern life means living high on the hog.
How can you possibly resist a piece that ends like that? It’s from Reforming the Humble Pig: Pigs, Pork and Contemporary China by Mindi Schneider, the final chapter in Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. The whole thing is open access, courtesy of Cambridge University Press.