Category: The Competition

Everything to do with our spiffy competition

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Images of Diversity

Grain GRAIN, an NGO, has published a photo essay that shows a mobile seed festival that took place from 14 January to 13 February 2007 in Andhra Pradesh, India. While GRAIN’s web technology is a lot cruder than Time magazine‘s, and the content is occasionally a little harder to swallow then even the Mexican family‘s fondness for a certain fizzy carbonated drink, it does offer a useful insight into seeds and agricultural biodiversity and what they mean to one local community.

So, GRAIN, why not spice things up a little and enter your photos in our competition? And the rest of you, why not take inspiration from GRAIN, or indeed Time, and document an aspect of agricultural biodiversity? You know it makes sense.

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The First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition

I was pretty blown away by a student video on biodiversity that I first saw at Evolving Thoughts, a science blog. It is a really classy little film, one I would have been proud to have made myself, a rapid romp through the entire subject of biodiversity and why it matters. But — you knew there was going to be a but — the entire thing devoted about half a sentence to agricultural biodiversity, and even then it was a throwaway line about food coming “from nature”.

Well, that just won’t do. So Luigi and I had a quick conversation and decided to launch the First Great Agro.agro.biodiver.se Competition: make a better movie (which we will interpret very liberally — animation, Ken Burns-style stills, whatever) and focus on agricultural biodiversity. Perhaps there should be a second category for posters?

We haven’t yet decided on a prize (how about an iPod nano?) or the detailed rules or the closing date or how to enter or how the winner will be decided. But we’re announcing it now so that people have a chance to prepare their entries. Maybe it should run for a year? Help us, please, by sending us your comments on this hare-brained scheme and also making it known to anyone and everyone who might be interested.

The Rules are here. If you don’t like them, tell us why.