- There’s a piece in The Guardian on how Spanish wine makers are fighting climate change by going back to old grape varieties like estaladiña.
- Maybe the same will happen with bananas, and its wild relatives could help? If so, it’s good we have this nifty catalogue.
- A pan-African tree seed platform is in the making, thanks to CIFOR-ICRAF and IKI funding. Where’s the catalogue?
- Here’s a video from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on A New Way of Teaching Ancient Foodways.
- And a video from USDA on their work on genotyping coffee collections.
- Meanwhile, Barbados is still thinking about building a genebank.
- The Genetic Literacy Project does some myth-busting (or tries to): have modern varieties decreased the diversity within crops, are contemporary plant varieties really not suitable for low-input farming, and is improving agricultural practices enough without plant breeding? Take a wild guess.
- Yam researchers in Benin have their own take on improving agricultural practices.
- More climate funding should go to food system transformation, says the Global Alliance for the Future of Food in a report. Those Spanish winemakers — and everyone else above — would probably agree.
Want to generate a 33x return on investment?
Using an 8% discount rate, the net present value of the costs of… [X] …is estimated at $61 billion for the next 35 years, while the net present benefits in terms of net economic surplus (the sum of consumer and producer surplus) are estimated at $2.1 trillion.
Wow, that’s a pretty good deal, what could X possibly be? Oh lookie here, turns out X is agricultural R&D. According to a report by assorted boffins from the Copenhagen Consensus Center and IFPRI, that is.
Bjorn Lomborg of said CCC has a decent go at summarizing the report in a recent op-ed, though the framing as Green Revolution 2.0 seems a little tired to me. ((He seems oddly ill-prepared in a later interview with, ahem, Jordan Peterson.))
Research published this week by Copenhagen Consensus demonstrates that the world will only need to spend a small amount more each year to generate vast benefits. It estimates the additional cost of R&D this decade is about $5.5 billion annually—a relatively small sum, less even than Americans spend on ice cream every year.
This investment will generate better seeds and high-yield crops that can also better handle weather changes like those we will see from climate change. Creating bigger and more resilient harvests will benefit farmers and producing more food will help consumers with lower prices.
The report doesn’t go into exactly what the $61 billion ought to be spent on, but I hope genebanks turn out to be on the list.
Nibbles: Genebanks in Japan, India, SADC, China, Sustainable nutrition security
- Another recent article in the mainstream media about the Japanese genebank. Not entirely sure why, but let’s not look a gift horse etc etc. Couple nice examples of re-introduction of lost diversity to farmers.
- And here’s the mainstream media in India (and the PM, no less) singing the praises of a farmer custodian of millet diversity.
- The mainstream media in Zimbabwe doesn’t want to be left behind and jumps on the genebank bandwagon too with a piece about the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre.
- Yes, silkworms need a genebank too, and China is all over it.
- The Union of Concerned Scientists wants a new definition of food security and genebanks could probably help with that.
Nibbles: Green seeds, Yam bean, Aussie wild tomato, Einkorn trial, US sorghum, Ethiopian forages tricot, Cuisine diversity, Apple catalogue, Hittite crash, Black Death
- Let’s say we wanted to transition to a more local and low-input production system in Europe. What seeds would we need and where would we get them from? The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament have some ideas.
- IITA is pushing the yam bean in Nigeria. Europe next?
- More on that new Australian wild tomato from a couple of years back. With audio goodness.
- The largest ever einkorn variety comparison trial makes the German news. Well, makes a press release anyway. Yam bean next?
- Another continent, another ancient grain: sorghum in the US. Yam bean next?
- The Ethiopia Grass project aims to improve livestock production, food crop yields AND soil quality. The trifecta!
- Nice infographics displaying dodgy data on the most common ingredients in different cuisines. Yam bean and einkorn nowhere to be seen.
- Cool community-created online catalogue of British apples. Looking forward to the yam bean one.
- It was drought that did for the Hittites, not lack of yam beans. Sea Peoples unavailable for comment.
- It was Yersinia pestis from Issyk-Kul that nearly did for Europe in the Middle Ages. Yes, you can study the genetic diversity of ancient deadly bugs and well as that of crops like yam bean and einkorn.
Celebrating beans, by sharing beans
With World Pulses Day coming up on 10 February, there is probably no better time to sign up for the INCREASE Project’s citizen science experiment, Share the Bean.
You can register your participation until 28 February. What will you do? I’ll tell you what you’ll do:
- receive a packet with a few different bean varieties to grow in your garden, terrace or balcony
- plant and grow these seeds following the specific instructions provided by the project
- nurture your beans, and collect and record information about them using a handy app
- suggest, and receive, tips and best practices, also via the app
- harvest the seeds and offer them for exchange, and cook and taste them too if you like
- send your assessments and recipes for inclusion in “Thousands of traditional and innovative recipes to cook beans,” to be published on the project website