- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?
Nibbles: Bees, IFPRI, Undernutrition policy, Haiti earthquake, Yeast
- Latest news on the bee front ain’t good. Except on Isle of Man.
- IFPRI accused of being industry shills. But where’s the evidence?
- Commentary on Hilary Clinton’s undernutrition speech.
- Monsanto did not donate GMO seed to Haiti. But it was hybrids, so basically a one-off. Better than nothing? Adding insult to injury? I dunno, you decide.
- So apparently we have the unstable margins of chromosomes to thank for beer. I’ll drink to that.
Beyond the staples
I haven’t been following the Millennium Villages literature — scientific and popular — quite as assiduously as I should, but what I have read does seem to focus quite strongly on the staple crops. No doubt a sustainable increase in the production of staples is necessary to combat hunger in Africa. But is it sufficient? The impression I have taken away from my reading is that that is not a question that is accorded high priority in this literature. If I’m wrong about this, I would welcome being set right. In any case, it came as a nice surprise to read the following passage in “Tripling crop yields in tropical Africa,” a recent article in Nature Geoscience by Prof. Pedro Sanchez, one of the moving forces behind the Millennium Villages project. ((I’ve taken the title of this post from the heading of the final section of Prof. Sanchez’s article.))
An increase in staple crop production is only a first step towards reducing hunger in tropical Africa. The provision of wider nutritional needs, such as more protein and adequate vitamins and trace elements, coupled with a reduction in disease, is also necessary.
Unfortunately that is not followed by a call to harness agrobiodiversity to provide those wider nutritional needs. But it does open an interesting door. A door that Bonnie McClafferty of HarvestPlus had no compunction about going through at SciDev.net a couple of days back:
The enormous challenge of micronutrient malnutrition is best addressed in the long run through poverty alleviation, economic development, education, women’s empowerment, access to adequate healthcare and dietary diversification, among other things.
Now, her defence of biofortification against the charge of medicalizing micronutrient deficiency sounds a lot like “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” which is a bit much, as in fact if anything it has been the good that’s been the enemy of the best in this game. Surely a lot more money has been going into biofortification than into dietary diversification — where, after all, is the latter’s equivalent of HarvestPlus? But it is good to see the importance of diverse diets — and by implication agrobiodiversity — at least recognized. Perhaps the Millennium Villages project could now plan some interventions around local vegetables and fruits?
Nibbles: Allanblackia domestication, Rampion census, Mali reforestation, Indian sacred groves, Oysters, Seaweeds, Breeding organics, EMBRAPA, Fisheries bycatch, Writing NUS proposals, Nutrition mag, Biofortification
- Boffins trying to domesticate Allanblackia for its oil.
- Phyteuma spicatum must be saved, British folklore depends on it. How about domesticating it?
- Farmers replanting forest in inland Niger delta. Sort of domesticating the forest, you mean?
- And here’s another domesticated forest, this time in Kerala.
- Are oysters domesticated? And seaweeds? Lots of uses for seaweeds, after all.
- Why plant breeding is incompatible with organic agriculture. Eh? First of a trilogy.
- Management of plant genetic resources in Brazil deconstructed.
- Oh dear, now boffins say avoiding bycatch may not be good after all.
- CTA calls for research notes in preparation for proposal writing workshop on neglected and underutilized plants.
- New Sight and Life magazine is out, with interesting discussions of Vitamin A supplementation in newborns and HIV patients.
- While at Scidev.net HarvestPlus defends biofortified crops against charge of medicalizing micronutrient deficiency.
Nibbles: Mpingo, Chickpea, Oak, Amaranth
- At last, sustainable clarinets!
- Hummus war gets serious. All that seratonin not helping?
- “Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men.” Simon Schama on Quercus robur. Note to BBC: learn how to write species names.
- Pop quiz: Some 20,000 tons of this seed were delivered by Aztec farmers in annual tribute to their emperor, Montezuma. Now big in the US, according to NYTimes piece. From 1984.