- VIR on Atlas Obscura, with pic goodness courtesy of yours truly. And on the same site, something Vavilov would have approved of: a very diverse Tajik apple orchard.
- A new avocado to conjure by.
- Urban agriculture won’t cut the mustard.
- Trees that named Fragrant Harbour disappearing.
- The downside of coffee. But never fear, there’s a strategy coming!
- The beernome!
- Happy birthday Sir Hans Sloane, for many botanical reasons!
- Chinese pollinators in trouble. Enough of the exclamation marks.
- Do you have any examples of “plant or animal breeding that has successfully incorporated gender considerations into its strategies and end products”? Contact these people.
- Can seeds learn from meds, policy-wise?
- Bioversity DG lobbies for genebanks.
- Get your fill of quinoa, courtesy of Jeremy.
- Sustainable pot. ‘Cause that’s the California Way, man.
NIbbles: ABS, CWR editorial, Wheat nutrients, Pepper history, Gene flow, Seed consolidation
- How can communities benefit from the commercialization of indigenous products?
- How can be best conserve crop wild relatives?
- How can breeders breed better pasta wheat?
- How did Europe end up using the wrong pepper?
- How can we monitor the escape of cultivated genes into the wild?
- How will seed industry consolidation affect diversity?
Brainfood: IPR in breeding, Cryo costs, Undervalued spp, Biodiversity change drivers, Cassava proteins, Sorghum seed sources
- ‘Do Not Privatize the Giant’s Shoulders’: Rethinking Patents in Plant Breeding. “Toll roads, not road blocks.”
- Implementation and cost analysis of a regional farm animal cryobank: an Italian case study. 2497 semen doses from 46 donor animals from 5 breeds cost €1550 annually, 83% for liquid nitrogen.
- Opportunities for Underutilised Crops in Southern Africa’s Post–2015 Development Agenda. Good for marginal land, good for nutritional diversity. But still not properly valued.
- Agricultural Management and Climatic Change Are the Major Drivers of Biodiversity Change in the UK. The first negatively, the second with mixed results. What about CWR specifically?
- Domestication Syndrome Is Investigated by Proteomic Analysis between Cultivated Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) and Its Wild Relatives. The leaf and root proteins of two cassava cultivars were different from those of one wild accession. More work needed, methinks.
- Interhousehold variability and its effects on seed circulation networks: a case study from northern Cameroon. Wealthy households have access to more diverse sorghum seed sources.
Tracking SDG 2, unofficially and preliminarly
The unofficial Preliminary Sustainable Development Goal Index and Dashboard are (is?) out, courtesy of SDSN, and open for comment. Here’s the list of indicators they used (click to embiggen).
Focus on the indicators relating to SDG 2, which is “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.” That would be the following:
- Prevalence of undernourishment (% of population)
- Cereal yield (kg/ha)
Uhm. What happened to the double burden of malnutrition? And both rice and pearl millet are cereals: do we really want to use the yield of such a nutritionally narrow but agronomically heterogenous crop category to track agricultural development globally? Also, not much there relating specifically to Target 2.5:
2.5 by 2020 maintain genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants, farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at national, regional and international levels, and ensure access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge as internationally agreed.
Because we do now have a good indicator, and indeed a decent baseline, for some aspects of that.
Nibbles: Chinese genebanks, Rough times at Roughwood, EU seed laws, Cacao & coffee migrations, CIMMYT pix
- China’s largest genebank just got a little bit larger. And some context.
- Small Pennsylvania genebank may get a lot smaller.
- Denmark shows the way on seed saving in Europe.
- Chocolate really got around.
- Coffee didn’t do too badly either. But home is where the heart is.
- More pix of wheat wild relatives than you can shake a stick at.