- IITA blankets Ghana with micro-propagated bananas. How many varieties?
- Hey, yesterday was Biodiversity and World Health Day. Who knew? (Agriculture not relevant.)
- IAASTD says agriculture needs “…a new paradigm…” Discuss.
- Israeli genebank has to fight for cash. Jeremy comments: alert the media.
African protected areas surveyed
The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:
The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.
It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.
Nibbles: potato, EU catalogue, trees, cocoa
- Boffins discuss potatoes in Cuzco. The media are duly alerted.
- Dominique Guillet (M. Kokopelli) offers his French history of the EU Common Catalogue. Jeremy comments: “You translate it, we’ll post it”.
- Tanzanian women making money from tree diversity.
- “UK committed to Ghanaian cocoa farmers.” And to cacao diversity?
- Yams in trouble in Nigeria. Make that foufou to go.
Research on crofting reveals oppression, not much else
A few days ago a short article in the Farmers Guardian, a British rural newspaper, mentioned what sounds like an interesting research project: “Crofters: Indigenous People of the Highlands and Islands.” Unfortunately, a look at the Scottish Crofting Foundation website doesn’t reveal much more information. It would have been nice to know, for example, whether the project looked at the contribution crofters make to on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity. Surely there was more to the project than a glossy brochure moaning about the oppression of indigenous crofters. Maybe Maria Scholten will be able to tell us.
Meanwhile, in another part of darkest Britain, another traditional lifestyle based on the management and use of agricultural biodiversity — thatching — is having to go through bureaucratic hoops. I’ll let Danny over at Rurality tell you all about it. Would be funny if it wasn’t sad. Traditional doesn’t mean unchanging, guys.
Nibbles: Carnival, farmer schools, zero-till, drought, barley, ag college, organic choc, ICTs
- Tangled Bank 101.
- From ELDIS 1: Farmers in Malawi learn best from one another.
- From ELDIS 2: Improving crop-livestock systems in Ethiopia.
- Nature and Science on the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
- Barley makes a come-back? No, it’s not beer-related, Jeremy.
- A call for respect for Nagpur’s agricultural college in its centenary year. Seconded.
- Internets buzzing this morning. Check out a NatGeo video on how organic cacao is saving the rainforest in the Dominican Republic.
- CTA wants one laptop per farmer. Not just to “make better PowerPoints,” though.