- Economic growth and biodiversity. “There is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity.” Hmmmmn.
- Phytodiversity of temperate permanent grasslands: ecosystem services for agriculture and livestock management for diversity conservation. At heart, a plea for more interdisciplinary research.
- The Interaction between Seaweed Farming as an Alternative Occupation and Fisher Numbers in the Central Philippines. Alternative occupations don’t necessarily reduce over-harvesting.
- Genotyping of pedigreed apple breeding material with a genome-covering set of SSRs: trueness-to-type of cultivars and their parentages. Your papa aint your papa but your papa don’t know.
- The GCP molecular marker toolkit, an instrument for use in breeding food security crops. Marker-assisted selection is not yet used for Musa spp., coconut, lentils, millets, pigeonpea, sweet potato, and yam. For the other 12 crops, 214 molecular markers were found to be effectively used in association with 74 different traits.
- Ant diversity and bio-indicators in land management of lac insect agroecosystem in Southwestern China. When you’re managing for a wild insect, the wild species are secondary.
- Biofortification for combating ‘hidden hunger’ for iron. Swings and roundabouts apply, with a vengeance.
Nibbles: Brand new tool, Baseline, Orange cassava, Food non-crisis, ILRI on the frontline, WorldFish
In recognition of the fact that I’ve spent the past week at CIMMYT up to my ears in the CGIAR, an all-CGIAR edition!
- CCAFS unleashes hell. Well, Climate Analogues anyway. No, wait…
- How does CCAFS measure impact anayway? Well, by documenting progress in adaptation relative to a baseline, of course. What I want to know is how the baseline captures within-crop diversity.
- Meanwhile, HarvestPlus is having another impact of its own. Well, I guess we’ll really have to wait for the health studies to be sure, but anyway.
- And speaking of impact, IFPRI now says that surveys show that the food crisis was not really a crisis for the poor, where simulations say it was. Now what?
- ILRI remembers the visit of Angela Merkel, and, probably unrelatedly, discovers the joys of fermentation.
- WorldFish got a brand new website. Does Climate Analogues work for fish?
Grass pea and food security
I’m taking the liberty of elevating a question form our friend Dirk Enneking to a full post, because I suspect more peple see posts than comments. Can you help Dirk?
Does any of our learned friends from India, Nepal and Ethiopia who have posted here, have a current perspective on the role that grass pea (guaya, khesari) (Lathyrus sativus) plays in contributing to food security in their part of the world?
Nibbles: Sweet potato value adding, Coffee and tree diversity, Spice and girls
- Sweet potato yoghurt? Yeah, ok, why not.
- Decreasing coffee production in Kenya can reduce tree abundance and richness on farm, but increasing production will lead to more trees but not necessarily more diversity. No, I don’t get it either, but have a look at the data yourself and try to figure it out. There’s plenty of it in this presentation.
- Love of hot peppers as benign masochism. Myself I think it’s a sexual selection cue.
Evaluating nutrition interventions
The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre has a review out of “agricultural interventions that aim to improve nutritional status of children.” There is both good and bad news. The bad news is that
The studies reviewed report little or no impact of agricultural interventions on the nutritional status of children. This result confirms the results of previous systematic reviews on the same topic.
Ouch. The good news is that
…unlike previous reviews, we attribute this result to the lack of statistical power of the studies reviewed rather than to the lack of efficacy of these interventions.
Hardly reassuring, though, is it. A couple of orange sweet potato (OSP) studies are included in the review. As I said in a post a couple of days back on a recent paper on OSP, which came too late for this review, evaluation of nutritional and health impacts is hard. Perhaps the new Bioversity publication “Improving nutrition with agricultural biodiversity” will help? It might with project design, but its section on evaluation doesn’t seem particularly detailed, and there’s nothing on impact assessment. Maybe that’s to come? Hopefully someone from Bioversity will tell us.