- You’ve heard of alternative lifestyles? Now read all about alternative pollinators.
- Why should we spend money digitizing natural history collections?
- Not all quinoa cultivars may be good for celiacs.
- The largest comparative growth experiment ever. Hope some of the 600+ species are crop wild relatives.
- Mangroves trap heavy metals. And sequester a lot of carbon. But they are moving. Thank goodness there’s lots of ways to value the services they provide.
- CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank is online.
- Kew boffins blow up coffee. The genus, settle down.
Nibbles: Climate change data, Transcriptomics, Food industry trends, Gelato event
- Climate Adaptation Country Profiles from the World Bank. Better than you might think.
- You don’t need the whole genome, apparently. Now they tell us.
- Where the global food industry is going. Some opportunities there if you think agrodiversity is important, Shirley.
- Wait, there’s a 6-day international event on gelato?
Bioversity ramps up its nutrition work
A couple of bits of related news from Bioversity. The book “Sustainable Diets and Biodiversity” is ready for downloading. And the first newsletter of the Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition Project is out. I suppose the project will feed into the new CGIAR Research Programme on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health. But it’s not clear to me what stage of development that has reached. The CGIAR Consortium website doesn’t really say.
LATER: Ok, I found it on CGIAR Fund website, and it does seem that the nutrition CRP has been approved.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
More on economists and Malthus
Catching up with some reading yesterday, I was struck by something Tyler Cowen, one of my favourite economists, said in response to a question about the Malthusian trap, a recurrent fixation of mine. It is the penultimate question in this lot.
Cowen takes what I consider an unnecessarily flip attitude to a very real problem.
Eventually the world will end, and somewhere along the line wages and living standards will be quite low. But until that happens, Malthus isn’t a very useful guide to food and living standards.
Even more astonishing, he cites India’s terrific increase in food production, thanks to the Green Revolution, without wondering why it is that the country still has such very high levels of child malnutrition and stunting.
The real problem is bad institutions, such as are found in North Korea, so our worst enemy is ourselves, not some oppressive force of population multiplication.
Malthus’ point, of course, is not that humans increase oppressively; it is that they do so more rapidly than agricultural productivity. Leave that aside. Is it all really the fault of bad institutions? And if so, why single out North Korea? Why not India?