- World Bank food snaps.
- Looks like there is phenotypic selection on flowering time.
- Workshop on revitalizing breadfruit in Hawaii. If you go, let us know.
- Sacred Seeds gardens around the world.
- How much do you know about animal production and health? FAO wants to know.
- CIAT now looking at soil biodiversity.
- Boffins can now clone plants as seeds. Clever, but is it good?
Nibbles: CBNRM, Extension, Seed systems, Climate change book and conferences, Cassava, Endophytes, Old Irish Goats, Plant Cuttings, Ethnobotany, Weeds
- Designing the next generation of community-based natural resource management projects. No agriculture. Weird. Well, not so much actually.
- Extension systems have a website! Yeah but do they need one?
- Informal seed system working just fine in Indian Himalayas. So maybe the extension system is not needed? But, hey, they have a website, did I mention that?
- Climate Change and Crop Production: The Book. And: The Conference. No but wait, here’s another.
- The unusual crop that is cassava.Yeah, but in The Economist?
- ” …among the largest collections of endophytes…” Not a lot of people know that.
- Old Irish goats (and others, to be fair) meet to talk about, well, Old Irish goats.
- The great Plant Cuttings.
- How to design an ethnobotanical garden. Would coca find a place?
- Musings on the evolution of weeds.
Many recipes to cope with food production needs
It’s been a busy week or two for food and agricultural policy news, what with the Arab world supposedly ignited by high food prices and weighty documents elsewhere calling forth high-minded rhetoric and tosh in roughly equal measure. To be honest it doesn’t feel right to do more than offer our endless refrain: that there is no one-size-fits-all solution out there, and that diversity brings resilience at levels from the individual meal to the global food network. And to point to some thought-provoking items. To whit:
The Economist’s deeply cynical story How much do rich governments really worry about feeding the world? seems to hit all the right spots.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food seems to hit all the spots you might have expected him to hit, buttering parsnips like nobody’s business.
And the European Union has, as usual come up with a very snappy acronym for a million euro project to tackle malnutrition in Africa: SUNRAY, short for Sustainable Nutrition Research for Africa in the Years to come. Here’s what they’ll be doing.
- WP1 optimises communication and coordination within the Consortium.
- WP2 maps current nutrition research activities in sub-Saharan Africa, and examines the operating environment.
- WP3 analyses the views of stakeholders.
- WP4 examines the impact of environmental changes on nutrition.
- WP5 builds consensus on research priorities through workshops in three African regions.
- WP6 develops a strategic framework for future research in the form of a roadmap.
- WP7 disseminates project outputs.
Aeroponic potato seeds in Kenya
A fascinating article on the Voice of America website tells us that Kenyan scientists, with colleagues at the International Potato Center (CIP), have developed a technique for growing potatoes plants in air (with water and nutrients) and then distributing the resulting plants to farmers, who report yield increases of 4 to 5 times. 1 The article dates back to June 2010, but CIP just shared it with its Facebook friends, and that gives me the chance to say I don’t fully understand:
Seeds are germinated in the laboratory. The seedlings are then fixed into holes cut out of Styrofoam sheets. And then after the seeds are developed further, they are harvested and distributed to farmers.
Talk about “seeds” and “germination” makes me think they’re talking about true potato seed, which has been the next big thing in potatoes for as long as I can remember. But if that were true, I would have expected the article to make more of it. And what will it do for potato diversity in Kenya? I have no idea what the market-leading cultivars are or the extent of concentration; how many varieties will the researchers make available?
A new rice for Mozambique
Scidev.net has an interesting report on how breeders at IRRI and the Africa Rice Center, working with scientists and farmers in Mozambique, have developed a new variety of rice that offers almost six times the average yield and is more tolerant of diseases. The new variety is currently still known as IR80482-64-3-3-3 and has just entered Mozambique’s formal seed sector for bulking up and eventual supply to farmers.
That’s good news for Mozambique and farmers, although it isn’t the end of the story:
“For irrigated and rainfed lowland ecosystems we can produce rice varieties that combine high yield, resistance to major diseases and superior grain quality accepted by local and international markets,” said Surapong Sarkarung, an IRRI rice breeder based in Mozambique.
But he added that drawbacks could be: the low capacity of the seed sector to produce certified seed; lack of milling equipment to produce high standard milled rice and lack of credit to support farmers to buy inputs such as seed, fertilisers and machinery.
And of course we are duty bound to ask: will any effort be made to collect Mozambique’s existing varieties before the new variety sweeps them away? Or maybe that’s already been done.