Policy

The real cost of food

The True-Cost Accounting in Food & Farming conference is wrapping up today. There are plenty of videos on the Sustainable Food Trust website. And of course there’s a hashtag, #TCAConf, if you want to follow live. You just missed Jules Pretty, for example. Are any of our readers there, I wonder?

One (admittedly fairly big) thing to do to fix the food system.
Two-faced fique.
14 minutes — count them — on the Land Institute’s work on perennial cereals. Well worth it.
18 graphics to explain the food system. You know, the one that needs fixing.

Emma Cooper blogs her ethnobotanical MSc dissertation on British homegardeners and their cool crops.
If she’d done her work in Sweden, she’d have written about Ragnar Pettersson and his “treasure of Ardre.”
The downside of backyard farming: homeless hens.
International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability: Genebank Database Hell gets an e-conference. What could possibly go wrong.
Apparently there’s a new way to search for agricultural bibliografic (sic) data.
CIMMYT gets its maize out there.
ICRISAT is not one to hide its light under a bushel either.
Aussies to survey their yeasts and bacteria to improve winemaking.
The problems of India: “It takes a particular brand of incompetence and neglect for decades of stellar growth to have no apparent impact on India’s sky-high levels of under-nutrition.” I bet Dreze and Sen didn’t include a food bubble. Hey, but that can be exported.
Oh and happy World Soil Day! Thanks to it, and Jim Croft, I now know Australia has a sort of soil genebank.

Plants for Europe is (are?) incensed about new EU regulations. Should it/they be?
Squash is a Native American word, natch. I bet they’re incensed.
Speaking of Native American crops, here’s a big writeup on the potato, including great pix, and nice shoutout for the CIP genebank.
If you live in the tropics and want to learn about agroforestry, you could just go out and talk to the first smallholder you meet. Or you could read a textbook.
A roundtable on whether genetics can help us figure out whether wine is good for you. When they do the large scale clinical trial, as they surely must, I’ll be first in line.
The breakthroughs of agriculture. Sadly, working out the seed viability equation does not feature. Nor does vegetarianism.
Breeding does, though. And here’s an example why, featuring soybeans.
And another from rice: IRRI bags another silver bullet gene.
And we’ll soon have those in cotton too.
Which is all fully recognized in the latest WRI report on how to feed the world.
Though not in this other mega-report on Brazil, at least not quite so explicitly.
“We need more research” is the wrong answer. Even when it’s breeding?

Oh, bloody hell, you mean there’s an International Farmer Innovation Day, and it was yesterday? I suppose agroecology is a form of farmer innovation? And here you can hear the very voices of innovative farmers.
Sometimes farmers don’t innovate enough.
And sometimes they need a helping hand from the media. Or ACIAR. Or WFP.
Sometimes, though, they just go it alone, ploughing a lonely furrow like Rhizowen Radix.
Kew seed bankers visit the Caribbean. Nice gig if you can get it. Any CWR?
Wonder if they’ve read CTA’s new dossier on seed systems. Start here.
The Jess & Jeremy Show goes on the road. All food security and nutrition, all the time.
Is this why Jess blogs?
I wonder if Jess would agree with Jo Robinson on wild foods. Probably.
Whatever, as long as it’s perennial!
CIAT gets its climate-smart cacao work in Ghana into The Economist.
Well of course you need sugar in your cocoa.