Mainstream – Page 388 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

August 20, 2007August 20, 2007

Ancient chewing gum

Neolithic Finns chewed birch bark tarÂ for fresh breath, clean teeth.

August 20, 2007August 20, 2007

Douglas Gayeton photography

Slow Food-type photographs from Tuscany.

August 18, 2007

Opiate supply and demand

More on legalizing poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.

August 17, 2007

Food miles to go before I sleep

A plea to rebuild regional food networks.

August 16, 2007

Ex situ conservation in NZ

New Zealand opens genebank for native plants. No crops, but maybe wild relatives?

1. Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
2. Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
3. When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
4. The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
5. Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
6. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
7. New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Published on October 6, 2026