- Economist blogger tells conservationists to stop with the hotspot mapping already, and conserve something. DIVA-GIS developers unavailable for comment.
- Some of the tea in China.
- Filipinos abandon cannabis for silk. Jeremy comments: you can smoke silk?
- Nice tree photos.
- FT does the interactive thing with rising food prices. Via. Let them eat pasta, I say.
- Wanted: more mid-sized farms to fight The Man.
- Watch out world. Mississippi set to industrialise basil production.
- Ten reasons AGRA won’t work.
- A tale of two rice-growers; how the crop has fared in Brazil and China.
- Danes meet to save seeds.
- Southern Africans meet to save seeds.
The next big thing
Forget those silly pocket pigs. Who needs their smooth, anodyne winsomeness. What you want is a hybrid hedgehog. And the Time Team has a great idea for what to do with the little beggars.
Development one cell at a time
We’ve blogged a few times about how mobile phones bring farmers and fisherfolk closer to the market, and how this can work for agrobiodiversity. But of course agriculture is not the only field which can benefit; people all over the developing world have realized this, and manufacturers have in turn noticed that, and are trying to cash in. There’s an article in the NY Times Magazine about an anthropologist hired by Nokia to help them design the kind of phones that poor people need — and could help lift them out of poverty. Jan Chipchase is his name and if the article piques your interest you can see him give a TED talk. He also has a blog that’s great fun, and which occasionally even refers to food and agricultural biodiodiversity.
Making work pay
A heart-warming story of an unemployed (unemployable?) graduate in Malaysia who took up farming and is now making a good living. Azizi Ali started out with pisang berangan, a local banana variety, but also grows papayas and water melons, lemon grass, galangal, ginger and turmeric.
Uganda releases new soybean variety
A brief report on AllAfrica.com says that Ugandan scientists have released a new soybean variety known as MNG 8.10. The variety is resistant to a soybean rust (presumably not Asian soybean rust, or they’d be making a much bigger deal about it) and gives a yield of up to 2.5 tons per hectare.
That’s great news for the breeders and for Uganda’s soybean farmers. Just one churlish question; who will be eating the soybeans? Livestock in Uganda? Livestock in some other country? Or hungry Ugandans?