- See Gardens of the Pharaohs at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities from 27 April to 2 September.
- Iron-deficiency anaemia? Engineer a banana!
- Eldis shares details of a workshop on access and benefit sharing under the International Seed Treaty.
- A hugely successful Seedy Sunday in Amsterdam. Call the Seed Police!
- The BBC remembers Forgotten Foods. No, not NUS.
Nibbles: Gene, Database, Climate Change, Nutrition, Archaeology, Website, Prices, Svalbard
- Today’s maybe we’ll get some coverage if we link it to hunger and famine press release. Petunia gene.
- Today’s there’s a database for that announcement. FAO’s Horticulture Cultivars Performance Database.
- Today’s impact of climate change on X report. Forest resources in the Caribbean.
- Today’s debunking a crappy piece of nutrition research killjoys. Experts respond to nutrition claims.
- The Archaeobotanist has been going great guns; new book on domestication and millet domestication. We’ll pass on the museum post till we can firm it up.
- IFPRI says let two flowers bloom. Here’s the super-groovy new policy kid on the block for non-policy wonks.
- I’ll see your evil speculators and raise you a rising secular trend in food prices. (See what I did there?)
- With a heavy clunk, The Economist gave Svalbard’s Doomsday Seed Vault a fine 4th birthday present.
Nibbles: Women, Diplomats, Murderers, Speculators, Brainiacs, Participators, Cartographers, Foodographers, Native American agrobiodiversity
- Mo’ women power, mo’ better food security. ILRI leads the pack of CGIAR centres, but there’s loads of stuff elsewhere.
- British diplomat ponders the value of biodiversity.
- Less than a human life, at least in some parts of Brazil.
- Speaking (cynically) of values and prices, informed speculation on speculators is at hand.
- Berries make you brainy; so I guess that reporter hasn’t eaten any lately.
- You too can determine future-oriented research pathways for food security in East Africa, and no need to pig out on berries.
- A kinda sorta interactive map of European agricultural biodiversity. Is it sustainable?
- That map may need a special section for Florence, if one person’s photographic Florentine feast is anything to go by.
- If there were a similar map for the US, it would probably include this kind of thing from the Cherokee.
Nibbles: Eyzaguirre speaks, Hunger, India in Africa, Aquaculture, Mutation breeding, Climate info, Micronutrients, Peanuts, Crops from space, CIMMYT in Africa, Cassava beer, Heirloom onion, Coffee research, Newton’s apple, Gastronomica
- An anthropologists speaks about landscapes.
- ILRI says: “Landscapes, I’ve got your landscapes right here.”
- India makes its play for African agricultural landscapes. I hope there will be scorecards and women. And access to Indian genebank holdings…
- Will there be fish though?
- And will India be pushing its mutation-bred varieties in Africa? Not that there’s anything wrong with them.
- Or using climate information?
- Or mining technology for that matter.
- Surely there will be dual-purpose groundnuts.
- Doesn’t India have a satellite?
Meanwhile, CIMMYT is making its own African play. Maybe some of the stuff it is doing there could be useful in India too?Two dead linksAfrica could teach India some other stuff too.Dead link.- Pretty sure this nearly-extinct-onion-rescued story is totally irrelevant to both India and Africa.
- Unlike coffee research.
- I don’t suppose I can interest anyone in a not very nice tasting, disease-prone but historical apple?
- And speaking of historical connections… Well that was quite a journey.
Nibbles: Commons, Tom Wagner, CGIAR, Domestication presentation, Sophisticated urbanites, Vavilov’s potatoes in the news, Perennial crops, African drought, Aegean lathyrism, Heirlooms
- The vocabulary of the commons.
- An interview with Tom Wagner, a great tomato and potato breeder.
- The CGIAR Consortium has a newsletter, with bits in it about what they’re doing on agrobiodiversity, genebanks (such as this one), all that stuff. But I guess news of this big Africa-wide food security project came in too late. Oh, here’s another one, on ICRISAT’s new chickpea.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison on domestication. I am reliably informed he once extracted DNA from a fruit smoothie using nothing but household utensils and cleaning chemicals. Pat, is there a video?
- Urban ag in the Philippines. For some reason, there’s been a ton of this sort of urban food stuff on the tubes lately. Like this for instance. And this (compare current orchards in London with historical ones). I may just have to blog about it. Oh dear, I just have.
- The Glasgow Herald heralds the importance of Vavilov’s potatoes.
- Long post with lots of different bits of info on lots of perennial crops.
- Monitoring drought in Africa via pretty maps. And more pretty maps in search of a use.
- Ancient Aegean lathyrism? Dirk alerted.
- A keeper of seeds does his stuff near Pittsburgh.