- If you can map neglected diseases by phone, can you map neglected crops? I bet you can.
- It’s the turn of Samoans to be chided for not eating enough leafy greens.
- I had no idea AfricaRice had a podcast.
- Now we gotta worry about G&T too? Enough, already.
- Video on the wild yams of Sri Lanka. Not just yams, though, by the look of it.
- 100 recipes to understand the history of food? Count me in.
- More on the Polymotu Concept from our friends at SPC. Great gig if you can get it.
Nibbles: Dog genome, Ancient beer, Ancient bread video, Breadfruit funding, Chilean plum yew, Quinoa at FAO, Nutrition & ag, USAID policy, Tea diversity
- Dog domestication explained. In a bunch of different, mutually incompatible ways, but what the hell.
- But don’t worry about that, revel in this ancient beer infographic. Ancient beer, not ancient infographic. And more: can never have enough about ancient beer.
- And speaking of ancient foodstuffs, how about bread? Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- Bread too mainstream? Why not support breadfruit planting for food security? You can. But make sure you tell them to plant lots of different varieties.
- Or how about the Chilean plum yew tree, for that matter.
- Breadfruit and Chilean plum yew tree not mainstream enough? FAO not losing faith with good old quinoa. Oh no siree. There’s even a series of tasting events here this week.
- You want more nutrition, I’ve got more nutrition: here’s how to improve nutrition through agriculture in 10 easy steps, and here’s how we’re doing in monitoring how well we’re doing in improving nutrition through agriculture.
- Which is comprehensively ignored by USAID’s new Biodiversity Policy. Agriculture, that is. USAID handles support to the CGIAR, so they should know about agrobiodiversity and its conservation. Not really good enough. But hey, you can send in your comments.
- Nice pics of how people drink tea around the world. Could do with some myself just now actually, after that little lot…
Nibbles: Fishing, Food systems, Monitoring, Farmers’ rights book, Indian veggies
- Fishing in the gene pool, a presentation from that Eucarpia meeting.
- The Maine Law Review publishes a whole bunch of papers on food systems in the US and elsewhere.
- While Ensia publishes just one: food rethought.
- Conservation Magazine points to a nifty idea from Australia: Fluker posts. Citizen science for monitoring landscape change. Can we get some agricultural ones?
- Speaking of citizens: new book on farmers’ rights.
- Indians told to eat their (native) vegetables.
Nibbles: Indian farmer, Indian farming landscape, Guatemalan protected areas, Old phones, Geo-data, HarvestPlus funding, Cavia, Agronomy, Bee bank, De-extinction
- Bhogpur farmer Subash Chander Misra gets Plant Genome Savior Farmer award 2012 for pear conservation.
- While a whole farming system gets protected in Kerala.
- Hope it doesn’t go the way of protected areas in Guatemala. Maybe they need old mobile phones. Or a better roads or urban expansion dataset. Or maybe just their own maps.
- UK government puts money where mouth is with grant to HarvestPlus. For things like this from ICRISAT. And have you seen the BBC slideshow?
- Funnily enough, nobody talking about guinea pigs as a solution for malnutrition.
- How Australian agriculture improved its water use efficiency. Clue: it’s not one thing. Good to be reminded, yet again, that’s it’s not necessarily always and only about the diversity. Keeps us centred.
- Bees get a bank?
- The de-extinction debate rumbles on. Centred, did someone say?
Hedges, pledges and edges
Everybody’s calling the Nutrition4Growth at the weekend a great success, perhaps a game-changer.
The EC, The Gates Foundation, and the World Bank committed leverage the billions that are already spend on agriculture to impact on nutrition. These pledges are impressive — not least the eye popping $4bn from the EC.
Even, though with various caveats, the ever-cynical Laurence Haddad, from whose reality-checking post our title is nicked. Fingers crossed.
LATER: And here’s the CGIAR’s take on it all.