- Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
- Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
- The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
- The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
- Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
- Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
- “When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
- Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
- Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
- No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
- Cool crop domestication infographics.
- Plant geneticists are from Mars.
Nibbles: Farmers’ markets, Pacific news, Solanaceae news, Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, Tibetan barley, Rice roundup, David Lobell interview, Native American crops, Mesopotamian recipe, Insectophagy, Cities, Land purchases, Dormancy in evolution, Bad news from some crops, Good news from others, Creative Commons at Gates
- Hell of a week in the office again, so catching up on accumulated Nibbles on a Sunday. Because we’re here to serve.
- Cynical, funny take on farmers’ markets: “No, I don’t save seeds. That’s time-consuming nonsense for backyard gardeners. Yes, I’ve heard of Monsanto. I’m a farmer. I know about goddamn Monsanto.”
- Uncynical double from the Pacific: Samoa’s agricultural show and more detail on the aroid breeding work.
- High tech breeding of solanaceous crops. Nothing like this for aroids yet, alas. Yeah, but first you have to collect the little blighters.
- On the other hand, you also need an awareness of the past. Ask the Tibetans.
- And here’s kind of an example of that involving rice in India. Compare with that first Nibble: seed saving not just for backyard gardeners after all? Convinced? Go do it, no, really. Or read Bob Zeigler; you can listen to him too. We could go back and forward on this forever. I know: let’s get some data.
- And another example involving wild not-rice in the US and Canada. Though there are some things that haven’t survived quite as well among Native Americans as those wild rice recipes.
- And speaking of ancient recipes, here’s one from another wetland, far far away from the above.
- Yeah but not all ancient recipes are so resilient, take beetles for example.
- Urban farming is big, needs to be bigger.
- Meanwhile, agricultural land is being bought up all over the place, for what it’s worth, so maybe cities will be all we have to grow stuff.
- International Cocoa Organization calls bullshit on all those chocolate-is-running-out stories.
- Maybe we should chill about wine too? I dunno, I think I’d prefer to play it safe with both. Or get help from above. Or from the Fascists.
- The banana was going extinct too, wasn’t it?
- British apples (and other trees, to be sure) are of course perennially in trouble, but help is on the way, courtesy of Kew. And not just British or apples that get help from that quarter.
- “The potato will not only survive climate change, it will help us to survive it as well.” Good news at last.
- Mapping cassava, all of a sudden an exciting new crop, if you can believe it. No stopping it now that Bill Gates has called it the world’s most interesting vegetable.
- Incidentally, he’s also decided to go totally CC-BY.
- And that’s all she wrote. For now.
Have your say on international agricultural research priorities
(The) CGIAR is/are making a big push to elicit input on the new Strategy and Results Framework (SRF). You know the drill: a barrage of surveymonkeys, blogposts, tweets, Facebook posts, targeted emails, webinars, e-consultations, you name it, is coming your way. For all I know they’ll be knocking on doors in carefully selected neighbourhoods around the world. I’m always a little ambivalent when research organizations ask for help in prioritizing their work. On the one hand, it’s always good to ask. On the other, you’d have thought they would know by now.
Anyway, the outcomes of CGIAR’s work are now listed as:
1. Reduced poverty
2. Improved food and nutrition security for health
3. Improved natural resources systems and ecosystems services
And it is good to see the importance of the international genebanks in achieving these system-level outcomes recognized in the section of the SRF describing the particular niche of CGIAR:
The CGIAR community holds in trust globally unique genetic resources for a subset of agriculturally significant species of central importance to sustaining and advancing productivity and yield stability for the world’s smallholders in the 21st century.
Less good, however, to note that use of genetic diversity is thought to only contribute to the reduced poverty outcome, and then only via increased agricultural productivity. Sorry about the poor quality of the image showing this below, click on it to improve it a bit, but it wasn’t that much better in the original document:
There are “cross-cutting topics of global importance — women and youth; climate change; and capacity development — [that] will systematically strengthen and build coherence in research across all domains and Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDOs).” Should not conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity be one of these? Maybe I’ll respond to one of those tweets from @CGIAR.
What should be the priorities for International Agricultural Research for Development? http://t.co/OPWbKjFciV #ag4dev pic.twitter.com/ftQfg5WOAf
— CGIAR (@CGIAR) November 21, 2014
Global Nutrition Report calls for better integration with agriculture sector
The share of nutrition-sensitive investments in agriculture, social protection, water, sanitation and hygiene, education, and women’s empowerment programs needs to expand. The success of these sectors is important for nutrition improvement but they could do much more for nutrition while furthering their own goals. From the available evidence, the authors suggest that nutrition-sensitive expenditures are currently a small percentage of expenditures in these sectors. Partly this is because nutrition allies in the different sectors may not know what to do to make their nutrition programs more nutrition sensitive or why it is in their interests to do so…
That’s from the synopsis of the just-released Global Nutrition Report, the first of its kind. Their point is perhaps illustrated by another just-released report, this one on diabetes. When you finally manage to click through to the bit on prevention, there’s very little on diet, let alone the role of the food system as a whole.
Nibbles: Prof Brian Cox is cool, GRAIN vs Gates, Fragaria law suit, Central Asian fruits, Ecoagriculture, Forage breeding risk, WPC 2014, Nutrition trifecta, MSB funding, European seedsters support IT
- Final Human Universe episode features Svalbard Global seed Vault.
- GRAIN objects to where Gates Foundation spends its money. Nobody much cares.
- Latest on that UC Davis strawberry breeding programme debacle.
- Yes, bears do shit (apple seeds) in the woods. And some context.
- A conference for the hippy in all of us.
- The dark side of pasture breeding. Super-weed, I am your father!
- World Parks Congress on soon too.
- No access to healthy food? Use your mobile! Watch a video! Grow traditional crops!
- Toyota funds the Millennium Seed Bank.
- ESA supports the ITPGRFA. Speak Up For Seed!