Policy

April 7, 2011April 7, 2011

Spoiled by choice: Food crisis or malnutrition?

Cancel any plans you may have for Thursday and Friday next week.

Starting at noon GMT on Thursday 14 April, the World Bank hosts a “global chat forum about the food crisis.” A quarter of an hour later, a hop, skip and jump away at the International Food Policy Research Institute, there’s a seminar on Prospects for Golden Rice under the rubric Leveraging Agriculture to Improve Human Nutrition. You can watch the IFPRI seminar as a live webcast, which should end at 17:45 GMT. Luckily the global chat forum is, at least as far as I can tell, scheduled to continue for 24 hours, so you may not miss too much. (You can always follow the Twitter hashtags #foodcrisis and #wblive.) And if you’re not too exhausted, there’ll be a live webcast of World Bank assembled experts discussing ideas submitted by the public starting at 14:00 GMT on Friday 15 April.

April 7, 2011April 7, 2011

Nibbles: Barley genetics, CCAFS, VIR, Gardens of Adonis, Traditional Knowledge, Safety duplication, Wild pig,

10MB worth of proceedings of the Barley Genetics Symposium from ICARDA.
So, what will this CCAFS do anyway?
Russia offers VIR to the world. Again.
Adonis, Sappho and lettuce, all in one post.
Modern science needs traditional knowledge. And a fish needs a bicycle.
Global Crop Diversity Trust and Latin American genebanks team up to rescue another bunch of crops: coffee, tomatoes, chillies, beans, squash etc.
The world’s smallest and rarest wild suid is cute enough, not as cute as pocket pigs.

April 5, 2011April 5, 2011

Nibbles: Pigeonpea, Agrobiodiversity book, Agroforestry

USC promotes pigeonpeas. And why not.
“Agrobiodiversity Management for Food Security: A Critical Review” by J M Lenné and D Wood hits newsstands.
How ICRAF intends to stop agroforestry being marginalized in the new CGIAR. Their words (more or less), not mine.

April 1, 2011April 1, 2011

Nibbles: Cardamom, FIGS, Descriptors, Haiti

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.

March 31, 2011

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?