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.

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

Tomatoes in Ghana

Cotton farmer suicides in India get all the press, but three years ago we noted briefly the apparent suicide of tomato growers in Ghana. Today sees a meeting in Accra “for a unique exchange of views on how to revive the strategic but ailing tomato sector.” Farmers, traders, processors, academics and donors will be thrashing out a more strategic approach to the tomato sector in Ghana under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and IFPRI (the International Food Policy Research Institute). IFPRI anticipates that:

Improvements across the board could reduce Ghana’s reliance on low-cost imported tomato paste, improve its foreign exchange reserves, and provide employment and development opportunities in poor rural areas.

How many wins is that?