- Calestous Juma gives new FAO head some advice: find a role, build on what farmers do and know, engage civil society, help governments prioritize, and slash bureaucracy.
- Religion and conservation: friends of enemies?
- Eastern Africa Agricultural Productivity Project seems to be mainly about setting up regional centres of excellence in dairy, cassava, rice and wheat. Maybe ASARECA should ask for some advice from Prof. Juma?
- Land use map of the UK. Let the mash-upping begin.
- Training in sustainable conservation agriculture in India and Mexico. But how really sustainable is the whole thing if based on modern varieties? Oh, and Brazil too.
- Saving the Amazon for $33 a month.Or maybe just a buck?
- Local cooking a long way from home, Part I; from Colombia to Washington DC.
- Local cooking a long way from home, Part II; from everywhere to New York’s Lower East Side.
- Don’t worry, exploding watermelons are perfectly safe, and legal.
- FAO updates its webpage on “Implementing the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources” and documents the fact by providing a time stamp. Jeremy chuffed.
Nibbles: IRRI genebank, Andeans, Satoyama, Forestry fellowship
- IRRI explains its rice genebank. Is this new? Why are so many pages on the internets undated?
- Owen takes his Andean roots and tubers to another county. NatGeo not interested.
- FAO recognizes two Satoyama sites as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, making eight in total.
- Sub-Saharan Foresty Funding from the 2011 Abdou-Salam Ouédraogo fellowship.
Nibbles: Pullman, Global Plant Conservation, Germination
- The USDA’s Pullman genebank gets a nice write-up.
- Live from The Missouri Botanical Garden and The Global Partnership for Plant Conservation conference. Crop wild relatives mentioned…
- Hints of a role for growth regulators in germination of recalcitrant seeds.
Nibbles: Nutritional diversity, CFFRC, Heritage wheat,
- Functional diversity: a new tool to assess the nutritional diversity of African cropping systems.
- Crops for the Future welcomes the official launch of the Crops for the Future Research Center. At last.
- At home with the Heritage Wheat Conservancy.
Nibbles: Orissa genebank, Cornish bees, Andean Roots & Tubers, Ag at WCSJ
- Not content with its seed mothers, or a national or international genebank, the state of Orissa in India wants its own genebank.
- Bee biodiversity.
- Andean root and tuber crops. And none of them a potato!
- Some ag-related reporting from the World Conference of Science Journalists. It isn’t pretty.