Our friends at Crops for the Future do a nice job of summarizing the paper “The protection of Geographical Indications (GI): Generating Empirical Evidence at Country and Product Level to Support African ACP Country Engagement in the Doha Round Negotiations.” So I don’t need to, beyond referring to the bottom line: “GIs may entail trade-offs rather than the elusive “win-win” situation.” But I will say that I think it’s strange for the “Organization for an International Geographical Indications Network, … a Swiss-based NGO that represents 200 organizations and over two-million GI producers, from some 40 countries” to have a (fairly active) Twitter account but no RRS RSS feed from its website.
Nibbles: Coffee, British orchards, Wild foraging, African agriculture, Sesame, Taro wine, African beer, Brazilian pastures, Hemp
- First of all, I need a cup of coffee.
- Stop Press: Britain’s orchards neglected. Prince Charles to be called in to help?
- Eating the wild, in San Francisco and San Diego.
- IFAD on what African farmers need: infrastructure, insurance, investment. Apparently.
- Harvesting sesame in Greece: The video.
- Filipinos make wine from Hawaiian traditional food. Strange the Hawaiians hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps they did.
- And while we’re on the subject of booze…
- Destroying the Pantanal and Cerrado in a sustainable manner.
- Hey, it’s Hemp History Week! And you know how to celebrate that, don’t you.
Nibbles: Fair mangoes, Rice domestication, Saline collections, Spice collections, Aquaculture, Salmon
- Fair trade Haitian mangoes hit the shelves.
- Molecular boffins use nifty new toys to re-write rice history. Until the next time.
- The genebank of the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai has found material suitable for, ahem, saline agriculture.
- The genebank of the Indian Institute of Spices Research in Calicut has a large collection of, ahem, spices.
- The downside of tilapia.
- And, speaking of fish, it’s not all bad news.
Breadfruit roundup
Our friend Diane Ragone of the Breadfruit Institute has kindly reminded us that there’s been quite a lot published on her favourite fruit lately. Almost worth a Brainfood all on its own, in fact.
Beyond the Bounty: Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) for food security and novel foods in the 21st Century. Great potential, but “a deeper understanding of the nutritional characteristics and the development of new products and markets are needed.” Which is kinda provided, at least to some extent, by the next two papers.
Diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, Moraceae) seasonality: A resource for year-round nutrition. “About 24 cultivars exhibited very little seasonality and produced fruit throughout the year. The rest of the cultivars could be clustered into seasonality groups with characteristic fruiting patterns.”
Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. “…individual varieties … are particularly good sources of mineral and protein nutrition.”
Nibbles: Plectranthus, Roads, Fast food, Dog food, Hybrid rice, Mapping climate change, Turf, Cassava, iPhone app, Zizania, Rice
- Livingstone potato (Plectranthus) on the menu in Burundi. Yeah but what does it taste like?
- The world’s roads mapped. About time too.
- The world’s convenience food made better. Maybe.
- Dog cooking pot from ancient China. Woof. Via.
- Hybrid rice backfires. Via.
- Mapping the impacts of climate change. Only country level though.
- Native lawns better. But are they greener?
- JSTOR does a cassava roundup despite hating tapioca.
- Biodiversity monitoring? There’s an app for that.
- Wild rice (not a wild relative of rice, mind, but sacred to the local Native Americans) vs the copper-nickel mining industry.
- Slideshow on rice (the real thing) in Vietnam.