Category: Policy

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Let’s define success, shall we?

Professor Robert Paarlberg has a long article in Foreign Policy that takes a critical look at feeding the poor. There’s much in it I agree with, and probably more I disagree with. I do have one important question, which I’m loathe to see buried among the comments at Foreign Policy.

Paarlberg devotes some time to attacking the “myth” that the Green Revolution was a failure. “In Asia,” he writes “the Green Revolution was good for both agriculture and social justice.” So here’s my question:

Why are 44% of the children under 5 years old in India malnourished?

Answers in the comments, please.

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Nibbles: CIAT, Apples, Poverty, Protected areas, Honey, Juniper, Irish oak

  • Learn about CIAT’s reseach via the posters they put on slideshare. Couple on their beans and cassava genebank.
  • Trying to speed up apple breeding.
  • Biodiversity interventions find it difficult to fight poverty. How about agrobiodiversity interventions?
  • More bad news: protected areas don’t work anyway. At least for trees in Burkina Faso.
  • Boffins trying to spot contraband honey. There’s contraband honey?
  • Gin drinkers told to start worrying.
  • Forest of Belfast project to wind up, but not before finding really old oak.
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Nibbles: Microlivestock, Urban ag, Ag info, School meals in Peru, Agrobiodiversity indicators, Nature special supplement, Extension, Breeding organic, Forgetting fish in China, Deforestation, Russian potatoes, Fijian traditional knowledge, Megaprogrammes