- The 2nd Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change “Hunger for Action” (Hanoi, Vietnam).
- Barder and Kinder Debate London Health Summit and Food Security Policy, so we don’t have to!
- A review of a review of restoration ecology for ecosystem services. Ag?
- The Seed Underground: listen to a radio interview with US author Janisse Ray. Ag!
- Or, if that fails to excite, listen to Save the axolotl! Um, sure, but why? and tell us whether there’s any ag in that.
- There’s definitely ag in More than Honey, a new documentary movie.
- FDA slaps down misleading claims of fortification (in chocolate syrup)
- Cassava mosaic and banana bacterial wilt add to the food security woes of DR Congo.
- Rice growers get all the goodies, complain Sri Lankan vegetable growers.
- Ivorian agricultural scientists to open access to their research results.
- A backyard breeder documents his search for a better bean.
Nibbles: Drought, Vegetable talks, Bees, Communications, Resilience, Fungi, Breadfruit tools, Taxonomy, Orphan crops, ICARDA
- The Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy (Emeritus) and Deputy Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University talks about the drought on his Iowa farm.
- While Ted offers 11 talks on the transformative power of vegetables.
- A new use for urban bees; protecting the lead on church roofs.
- “Agricultural researchers in developing countries are keen to communicate their research …” Scidev.net communicates.
- Growing a high-value crop instead of a staple is not resilience.
- Growing mushrooms in a laundry basket might well be.
- Growing breadfruit absolutely requires some simple processing tools if it is to be.
- Speaking of growth, Jeremy abuses his position of power to direct you to Eight Fallacies about Growth
- HarvestChoice grapples with the nomenklatura problem; which genius came up with SPAM?
- The Christian Science Monitor reports that orphan crops will be the saviour of African agriculture. Again.
- ABC (Oz) fears that war will destroy the ICARDA genebank, forgetting all about that Doomsday vault.
Nibbles: Pollinator book, Museums, Quinoa and celiac disease, Plant growth analysis, Mangroves, Plant health
- You’ve heard of alternative lifestyles? Now read all about alternative pollinators.
- Why should we spend money digitizing natural history collections?
- Not all quinoa cultivars may be good for celiacs.
- The largest comparative growth experiment ever. Hope some of the 600+ species are crop wild relatives.
- Mangroves trap heavy metals. And sequester a lot of carbon. But they are moving. Thank goodness there’s lots of ways to value the services they provide.
- CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank is online.
- Kew boffins blow up coffee. The genus, settle down.
Nibbles: Plant Cuttings, Millennium Seed Bank, ITPGRFA, siRNA, Zoonoses information, Botanical garden, Rio +20, Italian bees, Brazilian coriander, Sri Lankan rice, International Treaty
- “Times are hard; everybody wants more (but seems to be getting less…)…”
- “The panels will produce enough energy to power all of the bank’s seed stores.”
- “One of the Benefit-sharing Fund’s unique features is the transparent process that governs the allocation of funds. After a wide announcement of each call, all the project proposals received for funding are evaluated according to established scientific criteria by international experts in order to fund the best projects.”
- “Basically we’re going to add bullets (siRNA) to the plants’ defense arsenal. It’s science fiction right now, but if it works, then the lengthy, expensive cleanup process could be shortened to two minutes.”
- “A new website provides examples of policies, institutions and stakeholders involved in the management of zoonoses, collated in a meta-database, together with discussion of cross-cutting themes and case studies to illustrate potential approaches.”
- “…the polka-dotted pumpkins were a hit.”
- “We all know this wasn’t the meeting where world governments were going to rise from the ashes.”
- “The tradition of micro-beekeeping has completely disappeared.”
- “No one buys beans, but they do buy cilantro.”
- “Teaming up with Alex Thanthriarachchi, 62, a reformed militant Marxist, Wijertane is on a mission to promote indigenous varieties of rice and other staples as the best way for Sri Lankan farmers to deal with changing climate.”
- “As a metaphor for itself, the treaty is the seed that is there and has been planted. It now needs to be used by all countries in order to keep sustaining life.”
Nibbles: MCPD, Coffee pollination, WACCI & IITA get into bed, Quinoa value addition, Plant chemicals
- Rejoice, the new edition of the FAO/Bioversity Multi-Crop Passport Descriptors (MCPD) are now available on-line!
- Pollinators good for pollination shock. No, kidding apart, this is Pollinator Week and we should take note.
- Another step in building plant breeding capacity in West Africa.
- How to get quinoa cake on the menu of posh Bolivian coffee shops.
- Virtual tour of my old stomping ground at the Cambridge University Botanical Garden includes a chemical trail. Which alas does not in turn include the main chemical we used to consume there.