- Food? We don’t need no stinking food.
- Bean breeder begs to differ.
- Where we could do with more food.
- Nobody’s talking about mitigation any more. Oh yes they are.
- Land shparing is the answer.
- ICRAF decides to gather evidence for the benefits of agroforestry for nutrition.
- More on those open source seeds. Which I hope nobody will counterfeit.
- Florida needs new grapefruits, whether open source or not.
- Naked neck chickens look weird, but they may be really heat resistant, so get over it. Ghana has.
- Canadian grad students summarize nutrition research in a pithy sentence. Sound familiar?
Nibbles: Global plant cover, Veggies in Africa, Ancient middens, Raspberry fruit colour, Citrus greening, Jordan biodiversity, US nutrition, Subsidies, Seed and voucher fair, Bean diversity, Grape mildew fight
- GIS geeks sort out land cover at last.
- Role of vegetables in combating malnutrition in Africa. Author offers pdf of paper.
- Ancient native American middens just keep on giving.
- Raspberry colour good predictor of various fruit post-harvest characteristics. Good short-cut for breeders.
- Getting to the root of citrus greening. Scary disease.
- Freaky stuff about using frog eggs to figure out the genetics of grapevine’s susceptibility to another scary disease.
- Video of our friend Dr Nigel Maxted on Jordan’s socioeconomically important plants.
- Physician, heal thyself. Indian tells USAID to take care of its own food insecurity.
- How to create subsidies that promote biodiversity, in a model, which is probably highly unrealistic.
- Very realistic notes from a seed and voucher fair in Malawi.
- And anecdotes on the benefits of bean diversity in Uganda.
Nibbles: Extreme aquaculture, GMO ver. 2.0, Wheat genebank, Infrared coffee spectroscopy, Farmer photos, Land grab, Reindeer herder photos, Mapping blight, Food security software, Fragaria moschata
- Farming cobia off Panama. Look it up.
- Gene editing is the future. But is it GM?
- More on the CIMMYT genebank from the Australian press. Get a room already.
- Fancy machine can tell fancy Yemeni coffee from lesser stuff. No, not DNA. Producers of lesser stuff unavailable for comment.
- Some of them may end up being photographed by National Geographic though.
- Before being forced off their land.
- Different sort of land grab in the Gran Chaco. Pity those poor wild Arachis. And here’s a meta-analysis of the drivers of the problem.
- Feeling left out, herders get fancy photos too.
- “The data indicates a broad distribution of this clone from Spain to Russia and Scotland to Cypress.” Good grief. Potato blight, if you’re still interested.
- From household survey data to food security assessment: The software.
- The bubbleberry is increasingly a thing.
Nibbles: New plant journal, Randomized trials under fire, WB to the rescue, Spirit in the sky, Please sir may I have some more, Flour powerless, Tom Payneless, Collecting for CIP, Regen redux, Cultivating my garden, Animal Crackers, Ethnomycology
- Nature has new Plants journal. With blog.
- More from the randomized trials backlash frontlines.
- World Bank sets up internal task force on climate smart agriculture. Oh good.
- No word on whether spiritual values on agenda.
- Hacking the school lunch.
- Indian flour mills winding down. Implications for crop diversity unknown.
- Big Australian writeup of CIMMYT genebank.
- Big CIP writeup of CIP genebank. And other collections, to be fair.
- It’s the regeneration, stupid.
- Gardens save plants.
- Sustainable diets defined to within an inch of their lives. Common factor is less animal products. But, as Susan McMillan of ILRI points out, for whom, and where?
- Traditional Maori use of weird fungus.
Yeah. Diversity is nice, but…
I find the whole debate about Golden Rice pretty boring. Not because I don’t think the subject — GR in and of itself, and as a symbol of something bigger — is important. Rather, because I think it’s very important to have a debate, but the way this is being conducted at the moment is just not likely, it seems to me, to lead to anything more than the further entrenchment of fixed positions.
For example, if you want a good encapsulation of (one side of) the wider argument, you could do a lot worse than this, from Richard Manning in Mother Earth News:
…the industrial ag folks and the Green Revolutionaries challenge us: “Yeah. Diversity is nice, but can sustainable agriculture feed the world’s population?” And then they rig the game by defining “feed” in just the same way they define agriculture — a narrow, linear process of input, throughput, output, yield per acre, calories per bushel, calories per person.
Now that’s hip and engaging, and makes its point in accessible, pithy fashion; but look at the tone — that disdainful “yeah” — and the loaded words used — words like “rig.” A couple of days ago, even before I’d seen this article, I was sort of indirectly accused on Twitter of not caring if children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency, because I had said that the debate — if it can even be called that — had become sterile: it’s not so sterile if you have VAD, was the counter. Right. That’s the reductio ad absurdum of the sort of the tone and language of the Manning article.
So it’s very welcome to see that Michael Pollan and Pamela Ronald, poster children for the two sides of the argument, have recently engaged in what has been described as a “respectful dialogue.” Hopefully more details will emerge, and a precedent will have been set, and we can move on from the boring — there’s really no other word for it — spectacle of people talking past each other.
LATER: And here it is, all two hours of it.