Nibbles

Nibbles: Foley Heinz award, C4 rice history, Fish feeding Africa, Sustainable harvesting, Sorghum death, Carver, Improving crops, Commodity production

Jonathan Foley, @GlobalEcoGuy, lands well deserved award for his straight-talking on food issues.
I wonder what he’d say about C4 rice.
Not sure he’s ever written about fish, but he probably will.
Sustainable harvesting of Prunus africana maybe not so sustainable after all. Well, I guess that’s science.
Encomium to the recently-deceased “Father of Sorghum.”
Shame he missed the round-up on improving abiotic stress tolerance in crops, linked to by AoB Blog.
Wouldn’t it have been cool if the Father of Sorghum had met the Peanut Man?
Global production of 10 top commodities has increased 130% since 1960, population by 89%. Draw your own conclusions about world hunger and malnutrition.

Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
What the California drought means for food.
And the one in Brazil for coffee.
And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.

Brewery opens sorghum demonstration farm in Tanzania.
Maybe California’s barley barons need to get into sorghum.
Paddy Gene Bank nothing to do with Guinness.
I really dislike the US habit of calling soil dirt, even when that allows alliteration about diversity and dirt.
Who do you know worthy of the Word Food Prize?
And the prize for jolting a dead cliché back to life goes to CIAT, for this stunner: International Photo Competition ‘Forest-Agriculture Interface: Gender Lens’.

The Czech national genetic resources programme in a nice brochure.
Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, by Patrick Mulvany. Another nice brochure. Not entirely clear why it’s not included in the Journal of Peasant Studies special edition on the relevant conference.
Forests can have Big Data too. Yes, it’s Global Forest Watch. And more from WRI, but it’s really all over the intertubes. No sign of the brochure. Yet.
“So when I eat this [corn] I eat with all the energy of my history.” No brochures needed.
Making agroforestry and agriculture in general attractive to yutes. Would a brochure help?

UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.