Conservation Letters has a paper which estimates how much conservation NGOs have spent in Sub-Saharan Africa. The short answer is about US$160 million a year in 2004-6, but there’s plenty of dissecting of the headline numbers in the paper. What I want to know is: how much of that went on agrobiodiversity. Or maybe just the wild relatives of crops and livestock?
Documenting African agricultural innovation
Do you have examples of the policies and institutional arrangements needed to promote agricultural innovation in Africa? If so, the Agricultural Innovation in Africa (AIA) Project would like to hear from you.
Doing well and doing good
The private sector can also have a positive impact on poor farmers – simultaneously enhancing food security by bringing them into procurement systems, a strategy that has the added advantage of giving corporate buyers a more diverse and therefore secure supply chain.
Want examples, check out the Financial Times report on Business and Food Sustainability.
Nibbles: GIPB, NPGS, Dogs for conservation, Harare gardens, Goat milk value added, Equator Prize, Humanitarian relief, Peruvian maize, Pseudo-cereals, Katine, Vavilov goes web 2.0, Travel, Haggis ban, African road datasets, Dyes, Adaptation pix, Baltic, AnGR, Jatropha
- GIPB revamps its website. Knowledge Resource Centre is ver. 4.0, no less.
- US National Plant Germplasm System explained to Canadians. Why? They have their own!
- Armadillo sniffing dogs.
- More urban farming in Zimbabwe.
- Interesting stuff you can make with goat milk.
- Who do you like for Equator Prize 2010? Avatar? No, wait, that’s something else. Well, actually…
- Nutrition for humanitarian workers.
- Large-eared white maize is ‘cultural heritage’ of Peru. So that’s all good then.
- Minor cereals and a gluten-free diet.
- Wanna talk to Katine? Ask about what the project is doing with/about agrobiodiversity, of course!
- Nikolay tweets!
- Agricultural and other assorted musings along the Mekong. Can’t help thinking that if you somehow aggregated all similar observations and geo-referenced them you’d come up with a pretty interesting picture of agriculture worldwide.
- A blow for Scottish agrobiodiversity and cuisine.
- Digitizing Africa’s roads.
- Natural dyes 101.
- IUCN photos of climate change adaptation. Includes agriculture! Well, sort of.
- Nordic agricultural scientists to discuss climate change adaptation. Grow bananas?
- Breeding Strategies for Sustainable Management of Animal Genetic Resources from FAO. Via.
- ATREE questions Jatropha.
Conservation International publishes Food Security Strategy
Conservation International’s blog has a post on the problems faced by pollinators. A nice enough summary, but what struck me was the mention of CI’s new Food Security Strategy.
As a part of CI’s new Food Security Strategy, CI recognizes the critical role that native pollinators play in food production. The conservation and promotion of native pollinators is an excellent demonstration of where synergies between food security and healthy ecosystems can occur.
You can find more about it on another blog post. Will it be another agriculture-is-the-enemy diatribe? Maybe not. Something else for the to-read list.