- Better late than never, but tubes kinda dead today.
- CNN rounds up food museums.
- Extremely cool iPhone app maps NYC’s trees. And yet we still have genebank database hell.
- The Maya buried their history in their homes. Now, can the boffins find seeds, do their whole aDNA thing?
- French research boss explains What it will take to feed the world.
- The history of sisal in Tanzania.
CGIAR Science Forum 2009 papers go online
Crop Science is publishing papers from the CGIAR Science Forum 2009. Lots of interesting stuff, including on biofortification and diet diversification, perennial favourites here of course. And all open access! Thanks, Jeff.
Rethinking paper on Thai government rethinking of sustainable agriculture
Don has kindly sent us a quote from that paper about the Thai government rethinking agricultural sustainability that Jeremy nibbled earlier today. He suggests it might be more interesting than Jeremy made it out to be.
The Department of Agricultural Extension (DOAE), created under the MOAC with assistance by the World Bank, played a direct role for disseminating Green Revolution innovations, including new high-yielding varieties, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and associated labor-saving machineries, in every subdistrict through the staff stationed in the district center… Yet, except for Central Thailand, where rice yields have risen considerably with developed irrigation systems, the widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies has resulted in stagnating market prices and yields throughout most areas of the country (Pasuk and Baker, 1995), persisting poverty of small-scale farmers in many rain-fed areas (Apichai, 1997), recurrent pest resistance and resurgence to pests (Sathorn, 2000), health hazards related to farmers’ inefficient use of pesticides (Nipon, Ruhs and Sumana, 1998), among others. Furthermore, a rapid expansion of export cash crop cultivation in the uplands of the North and Northeast, promoted by the MOAC during the 1970, with crops such as maize, cassava, kenaf, and cotton, resulted in rapid deforestation and massive displacement of the poor from the paddy tracts as dependent labor on agribusinesses with no secure titles to land (Pasuk and Baker, 1995).
May well be worth chasing down after all, behind its paywall.
Canada’s Green Party leads the world?
An email from Douglas Woodward of the Green Party in Canada draws our attention to a resolution on Genetic Conservation and Biodiversity, adopted at the Green Party’s convention in February 2009. The preamble to the resolution makes clear the importance of conservation for agriculture:
WHEREAS the conservation of habitat, species and genetically diverse local populations is required not only for the preservation of wild nature but for the survival of agriculture, the possiblity of the domestication of new crops, and the preservation of our food supply,
It then goes on to call for comprehensive collections of crop plant and domestic animal diversity, “especially for low-input systems of farming suited to a resource-frugal future”. This is now part of the Green Party’s policy for Canada.
Does any other political party offer anything similar?
Nibbles: Sustainability, Urban Ag, Briefed, Tea, Yogurt, Manure, Soil, Intensiculture
- Interesting stuff behind a paywall: Thai government rethinks sustainability. Not that interesting.
- Same goes for Latin American Agroecologists Build a Powerful Scientific and Social Movement.
- CNN Mexico shows-and-tells the Spanish-speaking world about urban agriculture. Thanks Jeff.
- Emile Frison briefs Eurocrats on the The key relationship between biodiversity and agriculture. Video!
- Reflections on the invention of agriculture in MesoAmerica.
- Nailing fraudulent labeling of Darjeeling tea. Throw the book at them, I say.
- Lassi: “It’s the taste.” Yeah but how healthy can you make the stuff?
- “We found large differences in manure levels…” I bet you did.
- Soil! Don’t treat it like dirt. (Jeremy’s favourite bumper sticker.)
- Veggies in windows, fish in cages.