Markets

Nibbles: All singing and dancing, FAO meets Big Data, Clone this, Patent nonsense, Frozen fish

Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.

GBIF makes its move.
Homaging the seed.
Learning sustainability from old Amazonian farmers. Really old. Really, really old.
Yet another Aussie genebank. Or maybe the same one, I’ve lost track. And interest.
Where climate data comes from.
Maine’s fiber community, what, exposed? Unveiled? Uncovered? And similar from Bolivia.
REDD+ will save us all.
Don’t crack open the mead to celebrate the solution to colony collapse disorder just yet.
All things Capsicum on one handy website.
Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.

No more mopani worms in Zimbabwe. Luigi distraught.
More tosh on Svalbard. Nobody distraught.
Chestnut blight threatens UK chestnuts. Castanophiles distraught.
The oily charms of West African cuisine. Did someone say “oily”?
Another big panel of the great and the good has issued a deafening report; Gordon Conway, panellist, tells us “How to create resilient agriculture“.
DFID fertilises Vietnamese mushroom farms. Kept in the dark and fed manure?
Yacon spotted in Malaysia. Just ask for snow lotus fruit.
The World Bank has published a Sourcebook on Agricultural Innovation. So can we all go home now?
Step inside the Millennium Seed Bank. A video.
ProMusa disentangles Pacific bananas, the better to conserve them.

Projects I should probably know about but had never heard of, no. 37: Cassava: Adding Value for Africa (C:AVA).
Projects I should probably know about but had never heard of, no. 38: African Food Tradition rEvisited by Research (AFTER). Mopane left unvisited, though, alas.
More from the ITPGRFA Secretary Down Under.
From genebank to farmers: bananas in the Philippines.
Things are looking up: there’s a new Plant Cuttings out.
We should all go back to seed school. Hey, just tell me where.
Family gardens for refugees. And for urban folk in Ethiopia.
Learning from the past in order not to repeat it, Vol. 88: Sustainble fisheries. Repeating it anyway, Vol. 565543 coming all too soon. No, wait, here it is…
It’s that time of year again, isn’t it. Spring. Bah, humbug.

The banana in the Pacific. Including those orange ones…
Swapping seeds at Kew. A genebank reaches out.
Gosh is that all today? Looks like it. You guys out there have anything?
No, wait, here’s something else. Huge cassava conference coming up, with its biodiversity on the agenda. These guys will probably be there.