- After yesterday’s thing on gum arabic, CIFOR’s blogger weighs in on frankincense and myrrh. Gums and resins renaissance, anyone?
- VoA on the ITPGRFA, with interview goodness.
- Soy sauce in bullet points.
- A Spanish food historian’s deconstruction of the Mediterranean diet deconstructed by Rachel Laudan.
- Fish in paddies: here comes the science.
- Côte d’Ivoire to revive cacao cultivation. By building a research centre?
- Pleasant, cultured and not so short foray into the history of the sugar industry in Kenya and Mauritius.
- You say sweet potato. I say yam.
- You say yam, so does Rhizowen, and yet … he’s talking about neither Ipomoea nor Manihot.
- Urban agriculture thriving in DR Congo.
Nibbles: Tobacco! Maize! Andean Roots & Tubers!
- Tobacco is enjoying a resurrection as a crop.
- Michigan State University to research adapting maize to climate change in Zambia and Kenya.
- Researchers & Restaurateurs Work to Save Peru’s Food Diversity; article and podcast. The really good news? Oca are not potatoes!
Nibbles: Agave™, Bananas, Intellectual property
- You can’t patent a plant’s formal name, can you?
- Brazilian banana meeting roundup.
- Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and genetic Resources Commons. a conference. h/t CAPRi.
Another VIP visits the IRRI genebank
This time it’s the president of Vietnam. There are 2797 accessions from Vietnam in the IRRI genebank.
FAO fruit art display
Clearly, I need to learn to stay on things at least a beat longer. Watching this made me seasick, and I knew what was coming. Anyway, the display is in FAO’s Flag Room. The posters (and accompanying fact sheets) are from FAO’s Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division and cite the Hortivar Database, which is a new one one me. And no, baobab wasn’t there.