- Cardamom scrutinised.
- A Lifeboat to the Gene Pool. Our friend Dr Dag “provides some of the first experimental evidence to support the FIGS concept”. With slides.
- Descriptor lists are important, says Bioversity today. No joke.
- An investigation, quite possibly partisan, but that’s the point, into emergency seed aid to Haiti after the earthquake.
How much spending goes on food?
There’s an interactive map at Civil Eats, which is great as far as it goes. But does it go far enough? Almost all of Africa is a vast gray expanse of “no data”. Where’s the companion map that shows what percent of a person’s diet they grow themselves?
There’s also an interesting statement in the comments: “Life expectancy is higher in some nations that spend above 10% on foods.” Mash-up artists, Gapminder mavens, what are you waiting for?
Nibbles: Gardening, Seed Swap, Mapping, Animal Genebank, Rice, Seed Treay, Nanocellulose, Camels, Bread, food Security
- Gardening is good for you. It’s official. And they didn’t even measure nutrition.
- European seed swap in Brussels.
- More fun for mappers; Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication. h/t CAPRi
- Australian animal genebank under threat.
- Filipinos ♥ IRRI.
- Big write up of Seed Treaty‘s recent Governing Body meeting in Bali.
- Wired magazine goes nuts for bananas and other fruits as sources of better plastics.
- Camelicious! The worlds first large-scale camel dairy farm.
- Food strikes in ancient Egypt. They’ve been revolting for more than 3000 years.
- Nice round-up of how indigenous communities in Colombia are protecting their food security.
Skin in the game: Africa must invest more
Promises made by African leaders to increase their investment in agriculture to ten per cent of their national budgets have been met by only eight out of 53 countries, the 7th Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Partnership Platform Meeting heard last week (23–25 March).
But annual international donations to agricultural research capacity in Africa have soared from US$25 million annually to US$120 million in the period 2005–2010.
It isn’t clear how the numbers SciDev.net reports have been calculated, and it doesn’t much matter. If better research really is the engine of economic growth that some people say it is, then one would expect countries that need it most to do their bit. What would happen, I wonder, if international donations were based on some sort of matching scheme?
Yo! Pavlovsk Politicos! Listen up!
Some of the accessions investigated by the project are nutritionally much more valuable than others. Thanks to the project, we know which berries they are. Thanks to Pavlovsk, we have the berries. On that basis alone, surely they’re more valuable than the land they occupy on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Let’s hope that the project team is successful in getting that policy message across tomorrow.
The Vaviblog reports on the first day of an important meeting, a round-up of the project on Conservation, characterization and evaluation for nutrition and health of vegetatively propagated crop collections at the Vavilov Institute.