Markets

Nibbles: Colombian chocolate, Urban ag, Subaks, GM debate, Taxonomy online, Genebank tools online, BBC on Kew, Australian seed bank, Cedar of Lebanon, Pizza philosophy, Feijoada

Move over Juan Valdez. Cacao farmers want to emulate a marketing icon.
Urban agriculture not all it’s cracked up to be. Living up to that urban ag icon, Cuba, is hard.
Bali’s iconic, traditional subaks are a complex adaptive system, and much better than modern rice farming alternatives. Makes you wonder why they need protecting, though.
GM bananas will save us. Not by themselves they wont. I don’t know why I keep linking to this stuff. Nothing at all iconic about it.
Iconic taxonomic revision tools online.
Something else that’s online is a bunch of tools for analyzing genebank data. Soon to be iconic, no doubt. As soon as people use them. So get cracking.
Huge BBC documentary on Kew coming up. I bet the iconic Millennium Seed Bank will feature.
Speaking of iconic genebank buildings, today’s one comes from Australia.
The history of an iconic Middle Easter tree?
The philosophy of an iconic Italian delicacy. Well, Neapolitan, really.
And in honour of the World Cup (I refuse to put FIFA in front, let them sue me), an iconic Brazilian dish. And don’t worry, those beans are safe. Somewhere iconic.

Yeah, on this climate change thing? We’re doomed.
Oh crap, there’s another genome: eucalyptus this time. Here’s the paper, you geeks. Great news for koalas, whose genome we still await, incidentally. Yeah, where are we with that?
SPC trains some breeders with Treaty money.
I wonder if they were told about Evolutionary Plant Breeding.
IFPRI has its new food policy report out. More on this later from us, I suspect.
The Bonn Titan Arum blooms! Well, I’m calling it a crop wild relative.
That gluten allergy? Don’t blame modern wheat varieties.
Podcast on the importance of genetic resources to sustainable forests.
Why rice? The Filipino view.
And the African view. NERICA’s good for women. And bad.
Bioversity blogs about World Cocoa Conference 2014, gets dates wrong. It’s on now.
Crop wild relatives in The Scientist. But I’m biased…
Busting malnutrition myths. Because they’re there.
There’s probably a few myths out there about halophytes too.

ICARDA DG breaks down barley research. Surprisingly without mentioning the germplasm collection.
Great interactive infographic of all the world’s trade disputes, many of which of course involve agricultural products.
Intensifying aquaculture comes with some risks.
Local doesn’t mean organic. And vice versa.
“Chickens are polymaths.” A new project will scratch around into the genetics of that.
Only Alaskan dog breeds are truly American.
Seed Savers Exchange busy making their seed happy.
Forest and language diversity go together. Literally.

Neolithic farmers spread into Europe by sea.
And it looks like the ones who got to Crete eventually gave rise to the Minoans.
And ate food not unlike what Cretans ate up to a hundred years ago.
Well of course the olive is important to all that.
Ten thousand years later, we find that organic is an impossible dream.
And Fairtrade may or may not work.
But value chains will make you free. Although that’s easier said than done.
And you have to be climate-smart to boot. Really, who’d be a farmer, in the Neolithic or now.

Banana germplasm gets around.
Kenyan urban cows get around. Not local breeds, though…
Can agriculture deliver both resilience and nutrition? FAO thinks so.
Yeah, about that: we’re gonna need better data.
Participatory varietal selection in Nepal. Not as novel as made out here, surely.
Brazil nut gets it all.
Today’s beer story comes from India.
Sorting the sheep from the goats, the molecular way.