- Colombia plants a bunch of peach palms. Hope they had some genetic diversity in there.
- Crop wild relative can tell you where diamonds are.
- Africa might need better seeds.
- Bangladesh certainly does.
- The black locust made America. The tree, not the insect.
- Another pean to agrobiodiversity.
- Towards a Research Agenda for Global Food and Nutrition Security: meeting at Expo 2015 organized by the EU. It’s today, though, and this is the first we hear of it. Sorry. Will genebanks even get mentioned? Well, if this tweet is from that meeting, it seems not.
- Cutting down forest bad for more than trees. How many crop and livestock wild relatives endangered by deforestation?
- Cubans ate cultivated plants a thousand years earlier than thought.
Nibbles: Food supplies, Food fotos, Forest foods, Diverse foods, Caribbean cassava, Wild foods, Expo 2015, Gates & SDGs, Nanoparticles
- What the World Eats: The Infographic.
- What the World Eats: The Photo Competition.
- What the World Doesn’t Eat: Forest Foods.
- What the World Should Eat More Of: The Presentation.
- What Grenada Eats: Cassava
- What Christopher McCandless Should Not Have Eaten: Not ODAP After All?
- Gulf states big stars in Milan. So that’s all right then.
- Gates Foundation really doesn’t like the SDGs.
- Boffins find promiscuous Phytophthora killer. Breeders surrender.
Nibbles: Forced exercise, Monoculture, Nutrition, Afghan poppies, USDA pears
- Get fit, before you visit Expo 2015 in Milan.
- Monoculture has a good side? Say it isn’t so!
- Too busy farming to cook nutritious meals.
- Another triumph for crop improvement.
- Genebank goes pear-shaped.
Setting genebank data free
There’s a strange little article on SciDevNet about the petition lodged with the UN by Norman Warthmann, of the Australian National University, and Claudio Chiarolla, of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in France, “to create a legal framework requiring governments to make data from the genetic sequencing of plants freely available.”
Strange for three reasons. One, why not make more of an explicit connection with DivSeek, which is trying to work through exactly these issues and was the subject of another article on the same website a few months ago?
Two, why link to a pdf of the text of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, when said instrument has a perfectly nice website?
And three, somebody should really have checked this chart of germplasm transfers under the International Treaty, because most of the “countries” listed are not countries at all, but in fact the international centres housed by Mexico (CIMMYT), the Philippines (IRRI) etc.
The international genebanks managed by the CGIAR Centres are by far the largest contributors to germplasm flows under the International Treaty, which is not something you’d be able to gather from this without a lot more background and context.
Nibbles: Gender myths, Cabbage myth, Deforestation, Urban ag, School gardens, Avocado disease, Tourism & conservation, African trees, European biofuels
- Hoary zombie gender myths bite the dust. Wish the same could be said of agrobiodiversity myths…
- The first cabbage, according to the ancient Greeks. A myth we can all get behind.
- WWF maps deforestation hotspots. Like the whole of Sumatra.
- Profits not the (only) point of urban farming.
- Maintaining food culture by gardening in a Native American community. See what I mean?
- After citrus greening, now comes laurel wilt. Poor Florida.
- Biodiversity conservation through tourism in Latin America. Including agrobiodiversity?
- The trees and shrubs of mopane woodlands, illustrated.
- European biofuels hit the buffers.