- Sudanese beer-drinkers in trouble. Let my people go!
- The future of tea in Kenya. Mother-in-law alerted.
- Meanwhile, Kenyan pastoralists go back to the future.
- Slideshow: “Combating hidden hunger through bio-fortification.” Beanz meanz ironz.
- May is Mediterranean Diet Month. It is? I mean, who knew?
Brainfood: Australian obesity, Pigeonpea blight, Chocolate spot, Agroforestry, Andean potato agriculture, Salinity tolerance, Tree migration, Tea
- The Australian paradox: A substantial decline in sugars intake over the same timeframe that overweight and obesity have increased. Wait … there’s an Australian paradox too?
- Phytophthora blight of Pigeonpea [Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp.]: An updating review of biology, pathogenicity and disease management. The wild relatives are sources of resistance, but that won’t be enough.
- Effects of crop mixtures on chocolate spot development on faba bean grown in mediterranean climates. Intercropping with cereals reduces the disease.
- Combining high biodiversity with high yields in tropical agroforests. It can be done, for smallholder cacao in Indonesia.
- And elsewhere … Cost benefit and livelihood impacts of agroforestry in Bangladesh. An entire book.
- Resource concentration dilutes a key pest in indigenous potato agriculture. Monocropping can be sustainable. Via.
- Community versus single-species distribution models for British plants. Overall, better stick with the single species kind, but it was worth a try.
- Quantitative trait loci for salinity tolerance in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). They exist, and there are markers.
- Climate, competition and connectivity affect future migration and ranges of European trees. Well, doh.
- Quantifying carbon storage for tea plantations in China. All the tea in China…sequesters a lot of C. But plant type doesn’t count for much.
Nibbles: Red rice, Feed the Future, Heat, GM seed mixtures, Sorghum, Millet, Sturgeon, Vaccinium
- Anissa makes a meal of red rice from Western China eco-museum.
- Want to influence the US Feed the Future “global hunger and food security initiative”? Course you do.
- Peak heat and maize yields in the US. Bear it in mind when you read today’s flurry of interest in a new study from David Lobell et al.
- Seed mixtures not a good idea? Say it isn’t so!
- $4 million to continue development of biofortified sorghum.
- Cooking up a storm, millets edition.
- They’ve outlasted the dinosaurs, but they still need help.
- USDA gets blue in the face about blueberries.
Contributions on sustainable food systems sought
From our friend and colleague Danny Hunter.
Farming Matters is the flagship magazine of ILEIA –- the Centre for Learning on Sustainable Agriculture. The September issue of Farming Matters will focus on local and regional food systems and how they can be strengthened to increase food security and build towards food and nutrition sovereignty. For this special issue ILEIA will collaborate with Bioversity International. ILEIA, in collaboration with Bioversity International, welcomes suggestions and contributions as articles and opinion pieces, photographs, contacts of people you think who have expertise in this area or ideas for other topics you think we should address. Contributions from all regions of the world are invited.
Queries can be directed to Jorge Chavez-Tafur (j.chavez-tafur@ileia.org), Danny Hunter (d.hunter@cgiar.org), Jessica Fanzo (j.fanzo@cgiar.org).
Oases in the food desert?
A couple of comments on our report of the USDA’s Food Desert Locator have made me revise my initial enthusiasm. People who actually live there seem to disagree that they’re in a desert. One pointed out that “the Korean market where I go grocery shopping every week is in the middle of a food desert”. Another, at greater length, explained:
I don’t know about how they define food desert – I looked at Ames Iowa and half the town is considered at “food desert”. Ames has a population of 50,000 – about half are students at ISU. We have nine grocery stores. Three of which are low price stores – such as Aldi’s. We have a public transportation system throughout the city. So how does that make a food desert. In summer we have two small farmers markets.
What can I say? We quoted part of the USDA’s brief definition of a food desert in the original post. Here’s the whole thing:
The HFFI working group defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store:
- To qualify as a “low-income community,” a census tract must have either: 1) a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher, OR 2) a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area’s median family income;
- To qualify as a “low-access community,” at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract’s population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles).
Maybe our commenters would care to comment on whether those criteria fit them. Or maybe they’d like to take it up directly with Vince Breneman (Breneman@ers.usda.gov) or Michele Ver Ploeg (sverploeg@ers.usda.gov) at the USDA, and let us know how they get on.