- No rice? Eat bananas!
- “Whatever the cultivation and consumption of cassava mean to us as Jamaicans, it cannot be just a source of comic relief.”
- Climate change good for coconuts. Well that’s a relief.
- Spud slide show.
- Gubernator helps Chile with its genetic resources. Sarah Connor unavailable for comment.
- Galliformes conservation in SE Asia. No, nothing to do with the French.
- “…the white part of the leek must represent at least one-third of the total length or half the sheathed part.” Yeah, that makes sense.
- “You really see that it’s the poor and persecuted who have been the seed savers.”
Nibbles: Migration, Micronutrients, Taste, Kava, News, Data, Ozone, Chillis
- Rats to New Zealand.
- 300 grand grant to develop an iron bullet.
- Yummie, that tomato tastes very umami!
- “When they call their toxic products ‘kava’, they are misusing the word.”
- Subscribe to the Semilla Besada newsletter.
- Gates Foundation helps FAO improve African agricultural statistics. About time someone did.
- How to conserve rare plants.
- As if climate change is not bad enough, there’s also ozone to worry about. Thankfully, Michigan is on it.
- Boffin uses nanotubes to measure chilli hotness. Useful because some don’t like it hot.
Nibbles: Medicinal rice, Dairy, Dates, Food, Cuba, Mango
- Red rice extract prevents heart problems.
- Got milk?
- Marrakesh date palms in trouble. But back in 2002 Gary Martin was doing something about it, I thought.
- “Diet for a small planet” revisited.
- Cuba’s urban agriculture revolution.
- “The Mango Mela, an agricultural fair dedicated to the fruit, … featured only 20 varieties, compared with more than 100 last year.”
How to build a keyhole garden
Via Hills and Plains Seedsavers, a video from Send a Cow, the people behind the keyhole gardens of Lesotho. To every thing, there is a season, clearly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjcjCCx3BWYI’m going to quibble, just a bit. Not one of the veggies given a namecheck in the video could be considered local. Are there really no nutritious and neglected species that the people of Lesotho could be growing? I couldn’t find any.
And don’t miss the extended comment on my original post from Jack C, a retired Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho. His view:
If the outside world wishes to play a role in improving Lesotho, they need to be ready to put up real investments that open up non-agricultural means of economic development. Short of that, the Basotho themselves need to implement the educational, social, and land reforms necessary to give those struggling keyhole gardeners the option of leaving the land. Praise of their industriousness is welcome, but what they truly need are choices. The land can longer support them.
Salutary.
Micronutrients No. 1
The Copenhagen Consensus has just decreed that supplying missing micronutrients — especially vitamin A and zinc — is the most important priority for global development. The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.
The Copenhagen Consensus website says:
Despite significant reductions in income poverty in recent years, undernutrition remains widespread. Recent estimates from UNICEF (2006) are that “one out of every four children under five – or 146 million children in the developing world – is underweight for his or her ageâ€, and that “each year, …undernutrition contributes to the deaths of about 5.6 million children under the age of fiveâ€. The undernutrition associated with missing micronutrients in poor quality diets is even more widespread than that indicated by underweight alone.
Undernutrition in turn has negative effects on income and on economic growth. Undernutrition leads to increased mortality and morbidity which lead to loss of economic output and increased spending on health. Poor nutrition means that individuals are less productive (both due to physical and mental impairment), and that children benefit less from education.
Reducing undernutrition is one of the Millennium Goals (Goal 1 aims to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger), and is also a key factor underpinning several others. Achieving goals in primary education, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases all depend crucially on nutrition.
I downloaded the Challenge Paper and the Executive Summary of it. The word “vegetable” does not appear in either. Nor “diversity”. That’s as far as I’m prepared to go at present.