Nutrition

July 10, 2012July 10, 2012

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?

July 9, 2012July 5, 2012

Brainfood: Red meat, Chocolate quality, Shea and livelihoods, Modeling extinction, Living collections, Sorghum & millet breeding, Hotspots, Ancient sesame, Breeding lovefest

Red meat in global nutrition. Not as bad as people say. But then the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would say that, wouldn’t they.
Optimizing chocolate production through traceability: A review of the influence of farming practices on cocoa bean quality. Manufacturers really need data on how the crop was grown.
Contribution of “Women’s Gold” to West African Livelihoods: The Case of Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) in Burkina Faso. It is high, especially for the poorest households, for women, and when other sources of income are scarce.
Herbarium records do not predict rediscovery of presumed nationally extinct species. Fancy probabilistic models based on number of sightings in different time periods are pretty useless predictors of whether news of the demise of a species was exaggerated.
The importance of living botanical collections for plant biology and the “next generation” of evo-devo research. “Next generation” sequencing pretty useless without the actual plants in “last generation” genebanks and “first generation” botanical gardens/arboreta. Don’t believe me? Here come the vignettes.
Breeding Strategies for Adaptation of Pearl Millet and Sorghum to Climate Variability and Change in West Africa. Involve farmers, bank on diversity, support seed systems.
Plant species richness: the world records. They’re only found in oligo- to meso-trophic, managed, semi-natural, temperate grasslands and tropical rain forests.
Sesame Utilization in China: New Archaeobotanical Evidence from Xinjiang. 5kg of white sesame seeds in a nice jug at the Thousand Buddha Grottoes at Boziklik dating from ca. 700 years BP means the crop was, well, used at that time and place.
The twenty-first century, the century of plant breeding. Accentuate the positive.

July 4, 2012November 29, 2017

Nibbles: Aphrodisiacs, Food Security, Access & Benefit Sharing, Berry Go Round, Weeds, Restoration Ecology, Opuntia, Sustainable cacao, Innovation

The rich diversity of aphrodisiac foods. Is it February again?
Why bother doing it myself when someone else had already stuck the knife in The New Statesman.
Making the Nagoya Protocol work at the community level. I know, let’s have a meeting. But will the ISF be invited?
June’s Berry-go-Round botany blog carnival is up, with a few relevancies:

Weeds revisited and rejoiced in.
A hero of restoration ecology remembered and refound.
The prickly pear as metaphor is apt and appropriate.
How green is the cacao industry? This green.
Yeah but does it qualify as an innovation system?

July 3, 2012July 4, 2012

How to improve nutrition

Bob Ziegler, DG of IRRI, explains why the world needs biofortified staples:

Take the example of rice, the staple food for more than half of the world’s population – including more than half a billion of the world’s poorest in Asia. These people often eat rice and little else. While rice is an excellent food, it does not have all the vitamins and minerals a person needs – so many of these people don‘t get enough essential nutrients like iron, zinc, and vitamin A.

A diverse and nutritious diet is the best option, sadly however, this is often too expensive or simply unavailable.

Simple, eh?

July 2, 2012July 2, 2012

Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference 2012…

…is off and running in Copenhagen

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) will convene expertise in the fields of biodiversity informatics, genomics, earth observation, natural history collections, biodiversity research and policy needed to set such collaboration in motion.

Follow it on Twitter. See the presentations.

allowing access to relevant environmental data and predict, anywhere on earth, on any res, at any time, as a service for anyone #gbic2012

— Donat Agosti (@myrmoteras) July 2, 2012

Report on it here, if you like.

LATER: Oh gosh, there’s also this today: 2nd LCIRAH Annual Workshop “The Role of Agricultural and Food Systems Research in Combating Chronic Disease for Development.” Here’s the hashtag.