- IDRC reports on Agriculture in urban planning.
- French end subsidy hypocrisy. Mais non? Mais oui! Via .
- More on assisted migration.
- Chinese pig farmer wins FAO plaudits.
- India puts traditional remedies into public domain for their own good.
- Kenyan crops in trouble from diseases.
Who you gonna call?
If you’re in the Pacific region and you’ve got a problem in the following areas, that is:
- Animal health & production
- Biosecurity & trade facilitation
- Crop production
- Genetic resources
- Forests and trees
- Forestry & agriculture diversification
- Information & communication and extension
- Plant health
- Agriculture & forestry policy
SPC, that’s who, by email. Great to see my old colleagues in the Land Resources Division in Fiji setting this up. It builds on the pioneering work of PestNet in the region. Best wishes to them all.
Jigawa experiments with cattle diversity
About 30,000 cows drawn from different species will be used in Jigawa state for artificial insemination experiment before the end of May this year, the state commissioner of agriculture, Alhaji Nasidi Ali has said.
Ok, I suppose he meant breeds rather than species. Although a follow up quote from the commissioner adds that: “We want to change the species and varieties of cows in Jigawa state.” Anyway, one has to wonder what this will do to whatever local breeds ((There are also lists of local breeds from ILRI and FAO.)) roam around Jigawa State, Nigeria. The recent State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture did not paint a rosy global picture, you’ll recall.
Mautam!
Once every 48 years, forests of the bamboo known as Melocanna baccifera go into exuberant flower in parts of northeast India. And then, like clockwork, the event is invariably followed by a plague of black rats that spring from nowhere to spread destruction and famine in their wake. For the first time on film, NOVA and National Geographic capture this massive rat population explosion in the kind of vivid detail not possible in 1959, when the last invasion occurred.
Sounds like a must-watch. Via.
Using wild rice to fight pests
Well, maybe. The article in The Monitor is a bit confused. Yes, there are wild rices in Uganda. I know because I was (marginally) involved in the 1997 Sida-IRRI project which collected wild Oryza in Eastern and Southern Africa. The material has been conserved since then in the National Genetic Plant Resources Centre for Crops in Entebbe, and has now been evaluated — successfully, it would seem — for resistance to Yellow Mottle Virus. Which is great. But the crossing with cultivated rice has not started in Uganda, I don’t think. The crosses that are alluded to in the article seem rather to have been between Asian rice and cultivated African rice (Oryza glaberrima), presumably aiming to replicate the success of Nerica in West Africa. Anyway, good luck to Drs John Mulumba Wasswa and Jimmy Lamo with the breeding programme.