Category: Policy

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Nibbles: Chickpea, Rice, Potato, Open seeds, Ipomoea, Cider apples, Functional foods, Colombian seeds, Meaty diets, Coffee ritual

  1. Chickpea breeding in the news, if you can believe it.
  2. Somehow rice breeding in the news is easier to believe.
  3. Or potato breeding, for that matter.
  4. The case for public ownership of seed. Now, that would be news.
  5. I doubt that changing the sweet potato’s scientific name will ever be news.
  6. Michigan’s cider lovers round up their favourite apples.
  7. Visualization on how to make functional foods sustainable.
  8. A Colombian (seed) exchange.
  9. People have always eaten meat. Sure, but so what?
  10. Anyone for coffee?
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Nibbles: Macron magic, UK Strategic Priorities Fund, Macadamia, Tepary, Nordic spuds, Diversification, Carolina rice, Couscous, Wild tobacco, Yeast diversity, Da 5 Foods

  1. France pushes for agricultural development. Money to follow mouth?
  2. Meanwhile, Britain puts its money into its own food systems.
  3. The macadamia is not diverse enough. Who’d have thought it.
  4. Couscous gets protected. Phew, ’cause it’s right on the verge of extinction, isn’t it.
  5. I hope tepary beans don’t become the next macadamia.
  6. Reviving old potatoes the Nordic way.
  7. Malaysia told to look beyond oil palm. To tepary and macadamia, maybe?
  8. Speaking of diversification, how about Laotian rice in Appalachia?
  9. Chasing the wild tobacco. See what I did there?
  10. Yeast has been domesticated by bakers into two genetic groups: industrial and artisanal sourdough.
  11. A history of the world in entirely the wrong 5 foods.
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Working to understand and conserve genetic diversity

Just catching up on a couple of useful resources.

The Genetics Composition working group [of the Group on Earth Observations’s Biodiversity Observation Network] aims to develop, test and improve approaches for assessing and interpreting genetic diversity.

You can join it here. And thus contribute to the Genetic diversity targets and indicators proposed for the CBD post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. About which you can read more on the work blog, as it happens. The working group seems to have some overlap with the Conservation Genetic Coalition, which came out with its formal “Statement on genetic diversity in CBD” just before Christmas.

Meanwhile, over at USDA, there are posters on crop diversity and genebanks in multiple languages.

Gotta wonder whether any of this will reach the policy-makers, but one can hope, can’t one?

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Nibbles: Benchmarking, Unintended consequences, Kenyan seeds, WFP, China genebank, Evolutionary plant breeding, Citrus, Maize, Lotus silk, Azolla, Spanish genebank

  1. How committed are 350 food companies to food system transformation? Well, take a wild guess…
  2. Mind you, transformation is tricky.
  3. A climate-smart seed system for Kenya? Would be transformative for sure.
  4. Great that WFP got the Nobel Peace Prize, but they’re only part of the food system picture.
  5. Another part is genebanks, as China recognizes.
  6. One way to use all that material in genebanks is through evolutionary plant breeding.
  7. Citrus: How it started. How it’s going. Meme alert.
  8. Maize was taken back to Mexico from South America in ancient times. And those early farmers really knew how to process it for maximum benefit, something we’re forgetting.
  9. A deep dive into lotus silk.
  10. An even deeper dive into Azolla-covered paddies.
  11. Esteban Hernández of the Andalusian genebank gets his 15 minutes.