Markets for agrobiodiversity to the fore today. Two resources highlighted by Eldis look at strategies for agricultural diversification and at the importance of assessing market potential in prioritizing among indigenous fruit trees for promotion and development. And once you get your high-value agricultural product to market you will want to guard against pilferage and counterfeiting, won’t you?
Terrible news from the northern Pacific
My friend and colleague Lois Englberger has just written to say that the building which housed the Secretariat of the Pacific Community office in Pohnpei and the headquarters of the Island Food Community of Pohnpei burned down during the early morning of 4 April. Losses were great, though thankfully nobody was hurt. Both SPC and IFCP are active promoters of traditional foods, and have done great work documenting and conserving traditional varieties of Pacific crops, and not just in Pohnpei. What’s happened is a terrible blow, but I’m sure both organizations will make a full and rapid recovery and continue their vital work. My thoughts and best wishes are with Lois, Konrad, Adelino and all my other friends affected by this in Pohnpei and around the Pacific.
Resources on PNG food plants
Bruce French taught Food Crop Production at Vudal University in the 1970s and wrote a number of books on the food plants of PNG. These are now sadly out of print, but fear not. I’ll let him take up the story:
In recent years I have continued to put together information for PNG, along with my wider project of trying to describe all the food plants of the world. At this stage I have several books written, available as computerised books in pdf format, on Food Plants, Pests and Diseases and Food Composition for PNG. These are all available on the website, www.foodplantsinternational.com, and can be downloaded. As they are fairly large books, and may take a while to download, it may be easier for me to send them to people within PNG on DVD/CD. There are also other resources such as photos, databases, etc. that could also be made available. The information should be useful for agriculture workers, teachers, health workers and other interested people.
You can find the publications here. They’re wonderful.
Via Didinet Issue 8, 2008 (not online).
Publicity for neglected species
Our friends at the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species have scored a minor publicity coup by getting a series of posts on the University of British Columbia’s Botany Photo of the Day web site. BPOD, as aficionados know it, is a daily source of stunning images and information to match. Sometimes the featured plant is economically important, and some of those are agricultural. But this is the first time I can remember a series devoted to agricultural biodiversity.
So far BPOD has covered Emmer wheat, ((I could actually quibble and insist, again, that farro is a mixture of hulled wheat species, but I wont.)) bay laurel and maya nut. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
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”.