Looks like Jeremy is not the only foreigner with an interest in agriculture blogging his way around China. Jim Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 1 “is blogging from China as he meets with experts on China’s food and farm system.” I wonder if he and Jeremy will meet up somewhere? If they do, I bet it will be at a market or banquet.
Food politics links
There are links to a whole bunch of interesting stuff on “Why our food choices matter” on bookforum.com today.
Maintaining diversity: an experiment
When we talk about biodiversity — including agrobiodiversity — we really mean three things at the same time: diversity among ecosystems, among species, and within species. Scientists usually study these scales separately, but can diversity at one level somehow affect diversity at another? That’s the question tackled by an experiment described last week in Science 2 and discussed by one of the authors in Scitizen (fortunately, because the full paper is behind a paywall). 3
Are farmers a dying breed?
I didn’t go looking for this. These three stories came to me independently, from different sources, from different parts of the world, but all within a day or two of each other. And all describing agriculture in crisis.
Starch and human diversity
Human diversity and agricultural biodiversity interact. The variation that exists between and within crops and livestock products in nutritional content is to some extent matched by — and indeed there is evidence that in some cases it has driven — genetic variation between and within the human populations that make use of them. We’ve blogged about this with regard to lactose intolerance and predisposition to iron deficiency. Now comes a study 4 linking variation among human populations in the number of copies of the amylase gene with the amount of starch in their diet 5