- 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’.
Nibbles: Czech agrobiodiversity, Food Sovereignty reports, Forest Watch, Mexican corn, Youth
- 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?
Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank
- 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.
Nibbles: New potatoes, Wild species, Native maize, Conservation course, Indigenous fishery, Yield trends
- Wild relative rescues potatoes. Which wild relative? Well for that you’ll have to read the paper. The FAQ on that. Or if you want an alternative. More the better, I guess. And just to remember what makes it all possible: diversity in fields and genebanks.
- Wild species not just useful to food security as sources of genes, of course. And more.
- Indigenous peoples save corn.
- Maybe some of them would be interested in this MSc at Bangor.
- Indigenous peoples can catch — and save? — fish after all.
- So is there stagnation in yield increases or what? Lobell reviews book that says maybe not.
Nibbles: Nutrition, Economic plants, Forest food, Banana descriptions, Taro leaf blight, Rwandan gardens, ECHO seed workshop, Aquaculture
- Nutrition is so confusing.
- There are so many plants, for a start.
- And it’s so difficult to get them from the forest.
- And they’re difficult to describe.
- And they get all kinds of diseases.
- Could grow them in nutrition gardens, I suppose.
- Learn to save their seeds.
- Or just go for fish.