It was only just over a year ago that I wrote, from Nairobi, a post about silk making in Kenya that elicited a number of comments. Seems like a lifetime ago. Anyway, today there’s an article in Science in Africa about attempts to make an industry out of wild silk in southern Africa. Sounds very promising. Via.
Nibbles: Aromatics, local food, rice, trade, cetriolo mate, maize, sweet potato, media
- The International Symposium on Aromatic and Medicinal Plants, 3-6 November 2008 in Noumea, New Caledonia. Anyone interested in live blogging it for us? He asked, to thunderous silence.
- Modern Forager on the traditional diets of some funky places.
- IRRI flickrs rice photos. Another day, another neologism. Via.
- The lengths people will go to exchange agrobiodiversity. Sorry, I have a thing about maps of trade routes. Via.
- Australian woman adopts Italian cucumber.
- Corn domesticated even earlier in Ecuador.
- Sweet potato may have got to the Pacific islands by chance.
- The truth about those hipster farmers; “it must be true, I read it in the paper”.
Recommendations of the Underutilized Plants Symposium
This just in from Hannah Jaenicke, Director of the International Centre for Underutilized Crops (ICUC):
Over 200 delegates from 55 countries gathered in Arusha, Tanzania 3-7 March 2008 for an International Symposium on “Underutilized plant species for food, nutrition, income and sustainable development”. The Symposium was co-convened under the umbrella of the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS) by the International Centre for Underutilised Crops (ICUC) with the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species, Bioversity International, GlobalHort, Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, and the World Vegetable Center, whose Regional Center for Africa was the local host.
The symposium was a resounding approval of the need for a working group on underutilized plant species to provide a voice to those who are working on these plants. The delegates endorsed the International Society for Horticultural Sciences’ working group on underutilized plants, which is co-chaired by Dr Hannah Jaenicke of the International Centre for Underutilised Crops (ICUC) and Dr Irmgard Hoeschle-Zeledon of the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species (GFU), and filled it with life and suggestions for future collaboration on research and development projects. A report will be published and circulated in the near future.
Following three days of over 150 scientific presentations, the participants developed a series of recommendations around four pertinent issues.
Continue reading “Recommendations of the Underutilized Plants Symposium”
Nibbles: Ug99, potato flour, rats, bees, cats, horses
- CABI blog summarizes Ug99 situation after one year.
- Let them eat potato croissants! Or so says Peruvian military.
- Boffin finds rats are diverse. Allrightythen.
- As if bees don’t have enough to worry about.
- Pussy scientists, in the news.
- Burkinabé horse festival.
Local to where?
One of the great dangers of the internet is that it makes everywhere seem like next door. So when I stumbled across Local Harvest my first thought was, “Not to here it isn’t”. But that’s needless nitpickery. The fact is, southern Europe is still sufficiently diverse that one doesn’t really need a service such as this to locate a decent source of locally grown food. I can go to my local market and ask where the produce was grown and get an answer. But I also know that this is becoming more and more of a luxury. So perhaps it would be nice for the many and varied farmers and farmers’ market schemes across Europe to come up with something similar. There’s something in London, but it isn’t nearly as inclusive as it makes out. May as well get started with it now, before we really need it. Or maybe there’s already something similar out there?