Neglected species

June 21, 2009June 21, 2009

Amadumbe: new readers start here

Ah, but the power of the intertubes. Bob has raised an old thread from the dead by providing more information about Luigi’s Nibble that “Amadumbe being sold to supermarkets in South Africa“. Some readers may not notice good stuff in the comments (one reason we like to feature a comment from time to time) and so we’re elevating Bob’s latest comment to a post.

I am currently based in New Zealand and have access to Taro in a few varieties , via the Pacific Island communities, one of which is the wild version, which has notably black stems. This is not true of Madumbi, which also has a flower very similar to the Arum. I would be very keen to grow the South African variety as it is a very different flavour to the common Pacific Taro which as previously noted is very bland. Here is a link to a picture of the flower …

I did some more Googling, and found out a bit more about the project and its originater; depending on the story that’s either “Dr James Hartzell, a self-proclaimed ‘white boy from New York’,” or Professor Thembinkosi Modi, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Agricultural Sciences. (Modi won a TWAS (Third World Academy of Science) Young Scientist Award in 2007.) Whatever, the end result was an organic cooperative of growers sending the amadumbe (or amadumbi) to a supermarket chain. Everything seemed rosy, with farmers reporting higher incomes that they were using to improve their lives, buying better houses, medical care, and education for their children. Except that there seems to have been a worm in the amadumbe: free-riders. Who were they?

Members who were male, poorly educated, partially certified, aware of loopholes in the grading system, and who did not trust the buyer.

The authors of the paper quoted above make specific recommendations to deal with the problem, but I cannot discover whether anything came of them. I’m also no aroid taxonomist, and frankly I’m not sure how informative the flower photo is, ((Downloaded from flickr.)) but there you have it. Now, maybe other people can chime in with more information.

June 16, 2009June 15, 2009

Using local resources to cope with high food prices

The 34th session of the Committee on World Food Security at FAO Headquarters in October 2008 included a side event of the Standing Committee on Nutrition on the Impact of high food prices on nutrition. Pablo Eyzaguirre, Senior Scientist, Bioversity International gave a presentation entitled, Coping with high food prices: making better use of local food sources.

Then he was interviewed. Well worth watching. Thanks, Arwen and Facebook.

June 12, 2009June 12, 2009

Nibbles: Plant bombs, Reindeer and caribou, Livestock wild relatives, Agricultural geography of North Korea, Cyclone rehabilitation, AVRDC, Kew, Organic, Farmers and climate change

Jacob alerts me that our “throw duplicates of all accessions from an airplane flying across Africa” Gedanken experiment may be closer to realization than we thought.
Reindeer in trouble. In other news, there are 7 subspecies of the things.
Indonesia looks to its threatened livestock wild relatives.
Agriculture (among other things) in North Korea.
Buffalo distributed in Myanmar. From where?
Local vegetables promoted in the Philippines.
More inspirational stuff on the Millennium Seed Bank from Jonathan Drori.
Organizations Involved in Organic Plant Breeding Projects and Education. Not as many as you’d think.
“Learning centres” helping farmers identify challenges, adapt to climate change.

June 10, 2009June 10, 2009

Nibbles: Tameness, Grass evolution, Baobab leaves, Cloning, Svalbard

The roots of tameness.
The roots of “grain endosperm texture.”
The roots of drought tolerance in baobab.
The roots of the difference between mitosis and meiosis.
The roots of Svalbard.

June 8, 2009June 10, 2009

Happy Birthday, Prof. Karl Hammer

And sorry for missing it when it actually came, back in February!

He fundamentally contributed to our present knowledge of cultivated plants’ biodiversity in Cuba, Eastern Europe, Italy, Libya, Oman and Korea. As an enthusiastic researcher heading the Gatersleben Genebank and later heading the Agrobiodiversity Department of Kassel University in Witzenhausen, his scientific work covered a tremendously wide field of research in plant genetic resources, ranging from pollination ecology and taxonomy (e.g. of Aegilops, Agrostemma, Brassica, Datura, Secale, Triticum) to questions of plant domestication, genetic erosion and evaluation, maintenance and utilization of the entire spectrum of plant genetic resources, including underutilized and neglected crops.

Many happy returns! Enjoy your retirement!