Wanna do a study of the state of knowledge on breeding for durable resistance to rust in wheat or soybean? Then GIPB would like to hear from you….
Nibbles: Community forestry, Fresh water, Salinity, Seed systems, Acacia, Iron, Cambodia
- Community forestry not making enough money in Namibia. Yeah, but who is?
- Southern African freshwater bodies in trouble. Gotta be some worried rice wild relatives out there.
- Salinity increasing in Bangladesh. That can’t be good.
- Let the people have seeds of local varieties!
- Australian takes acacias to Niger, coals to Newcastle.
- Breeding rice for tolerance to high Fe in West Africa.
- “One of the most abundant sources of fish in Asia, the lake feeds a hungry nation.”
Bhutan agricultural statistics go online
Yes, that’s what the news item said, and it got me all excited. So I rushed off to SINGER first to see if there’s any germplasm from that country in the international collections, and if any of that was geo-referenced. And I was happy to find some 30 barleys at ICARDA, strung all along the main road, from east to west.
And so then I went off to CountrySTAT-Bhutan to see how well this material covered the distribution of the crop. The results were a little weird. This is the distribution of barley cultivation in Bhutan in 2005.
As you can see, the crop is concentrated in the west of the country, whereas in 1981, when the ICARDA collection was made, that seemed not to be the case. Ok, things change. The oldest data in CountrySTAT-Bhutan is 1999, but the pattern is the same.
Has the distribution of barley in Bhutan really changed so drastically in the past 30 years or so? And if so, what has that done to genetic diversity? Have the landraces formerly found in the east migrated, or are they only to be found in genebanks now?
Ghanaian women not ready for biofuels
“Destruction of economic trees such as shea-nut and dawadawa trees actually deny community members, especially women their source of livelihood. It also restricts the hitherto extensive traditional rearing of animals in the affected communities.”
Bad news alert, from AllAfrica.com.
Human beings don’t need honeybee pollination
Yes, but “quality of life in a developed economy does.” I got the quote via a post at LEISA’s Farm which makes the point that most information on the recent bee die-off has come from the USA and Europe. If you know of similar observations from other part of the world, let them know (leisasfarm at gmail.com).