- Insights into Dutch cannabis breeding. Dude unavailable for comment.
- Cotton diversity link-fest.
- Head of World Food Programme on buying locally.
- US bee health: not good. Via.
- Australian sunflowers to improve US varieties; Luigi more confused than ever.
Non-wood forest products highlighted
The new NWFP-Digest is online, and as usual points to some great information, including lots of stuff on bamboo for some reason this month. And I don’t know how I missed the great article on women cashing in on indigenous trees in Tanzania when it first came out back in March.
Plants and health
Yes, yet another thematic trifecta. I swear I don’t go out looking for these, they just pop up every once in a while. CABI’s excellent blog had a piece today about CABI’s own fungal genetic resources collection and its value as a source of useful compounds. It includes Fleming’s original penicillin-producing strain so it does have form in that regard. Then Seeds Aside has a post on variation among olive varieties in a gene for an allergenic protein found on the pollen grain. And finally, over at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a thumbnail sketch of the redoubtable Phebe Lankester, who wrote extensively on both botany and health — and occasionally on the link between the two — in the latter part of the 19th century. ((Ann B. Shteir. (2004) “Lankester, Phebe (1825–1900).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/58526, accessed 10 April 2008].))
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”.
Kroo Bay story
Something else about agricultural biodiversity and health today. I’ve been following the diary that Adama Gondor has been keeping for the BBC — she runs a clinic in Kroo Bay, a notorious slum on the outskirts of Freetown, Liberia. The shanties of Kroo Bay are built on a garbage dump on the banks of a river, so Adama is very busy. If you wanted to have a picture in your mind of what extreme poverty and malnutrition and disease mean — but believe me I would understand it if you didn’t want to have such a picture in your mind — you should have a look at the website Save the Children have put together on Kroo Bay: it has some truly heartbreaking pictures and videos.
Anyway, I just wanted to say something about Adama’s post from a week or so back. It’s a sort of microcosmical illustration of various points we’ve been making about how important agrobiodiversity is — or, alas, could be — for development. A severely malnourished baby is brought in, and is eventually referred to a free therapeutic feeding centre in Freetown. She’s been eating nothing but rice porridge. So you start to think about how different things might have been if her mother had had access to leafy greens, or even Golden Rice for that matter. Both of which we’ve blogged about.
And then there’s the fact that the baby has been sick and has been given traditional herbal remedies — that’s all her mother could afford. Adama seems a bit ambivalent about this: she’s ok about externally applied remedies but thinks that internally administered preparations need to be better understood, especially if given to young babies. Again, we blogged a few times about initiatives around the world to study and “certify” traditional herbal medicines.