- Food security, or food capacity?
- “Brazil announces plan to become world’s granary.” We don’t make this stuff up, you know.
- Might Kenya turn against Tana delta biofuel boondoggle?
Cold comfort for rice growers
Cold water can depress rice yields.
At high elevations in Nepal, farmers re-route cold water from the main valley rivers to raise the water temperature before irrigation so as to induce earlier flowering and timely maturation of their rice cultivars (Rana et al. 2000).
From Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Policy Responses: Findings of the Responses Working Group (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) page 148.
In California, after a dam cooled down their irrigation water and a lengthy negotiation, a handful of rice growers will get:
anywhere from $1 million to $3 million a year, depending on the price of rice
From Department of Water Resources warms up to rice growers’ needs.
You figure it out; I can’t. Via.
European Commission directive on landraces
And here’s the text of the Directive announced in an earlier post. As it starts being interpreted and implemented (or not) in different ways in different member countries, it will be interesting to monitor what actually happens to genetic diversity. I hope someone’s gathering the baseline data for this natural experiment, or “randomized evaluation” as I believe economists call them. The floor is open for discussion!
LATER: Perhaps the Farm Seed Opportunities project will set that baseline?
Nibbles: Fungi, Cacao, Animal husbandry, China, Africa, Maize, Genebank
- Diverse strains + diverse substrates = diverse shiitake.
- Chocolate is from Mars. Jeremy comments: “A disease called witches”??? BBC Science reporting strikes again. Get the USDA’s version.
- Eldis on a roll this morning: Livestock and climate change in Africa, sustainability of Chinese agriculture, beyond magic bullets in African agriculture.
- EurekAlert! tries to catch up: Mexican landraces.
- Quality assured potato genebank.
Commission embraces agricultural biodiversity?
This news item out of the European Commission seems to be very important, so I think I’m justified in reproducing it in full below, especially as the specific item does not yet have a url all to itself (though there is a fairly general one):
The Commission adopted on Friday June 20 a proposal that will help preserve biodiversity. Member States had already endorsed the proposal in mid April. The proposal to protect seed varieties of agricultural crops, which may be threatened by genetic erosion, will also enable small plant breeding companies to supply local markets with naturally adapted seed varieties. These seed varieties are mostly old locally used varieties threatened by extinction.
The proposal foresees derogations from the EU seed marketing legislation for seed varieties that are naturally adapted to local conditions, but which currently cannot be marketed because they do not fulfil certain criteria. Under EU legislation, seed varieties must undergo an approval process and get listed on the national and common seed catalogues before they can be marketed within the territory of the EU. These rules ensure that EU farmers have access to high quality seed. Certain varieties, which are not found on these catalogues, are still important to ensure that plant genetic diversity is not diminished. The Commission has therefore proposed that these varieties could be placed on the catalogues without official examination, once they meet some minimum standards.
Jeremy has blogged several times about this. I guess the devil will be in the detail, but it does look encouraging. Anyone have more information?