Urban agriculture

Leftovers: Coconuts, Genebank, Vegetables, Famine, Danish, Bissap, Brazil nuts, Dates, Papas y mas, Fruit, Rice, Everything

We found these nibbles at the back of the fridge, and they’re not too mouldy, so lets fry them up before we get anything fresh.

Boss of India’s agricultural research exhorts international coconut genebank to do more and be heard.
And, first out of the gate for 2012, Nepal says it will create a new genebank for plants “on the verge of extinction”.
Immigrant urban agriculture — in Cleveland, Ohio.
Aid man Edward Carr interviewed: “drought does not equal famine”
Meetings on “biodiversity” in Europe, under the Danish presidency. Indigestible?
Hibiscus tea, what a tonic.
Resources Research goes crazed for book about brazil nuts, and other Amazonian agrobiodiversity.
A cure for Bayoud disease of dates? And it’s based on medicinal plants!
Pueblos andinos reciben ejemplares de tubérculos nativos. Otra vez?
Guerilla grafting? Now there’s an idea for “covert agriculture”. Wonder what the graftees think.
“The giant panda of the botanical world”? Blimey. A new reserve for real wild rice.
Huge Satoyama-style paper from Bioversity on THE USE OF AGROBIODIVERSITY BY INDIGENOUS AND TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITIES IN: ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE And they’re the ones doing the shouting.

Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.

The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
“These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.

After yesterday’s thing on gum arabic, CIFOR’s blogger weighs in on frankincense and myrrh. Gums and resins renaissance, anyone?
VoA on the ITPGRFA, with interview goodness.
Soy sauce in bullet points.
A Spanish food historian’s deconstruction of the Mediterranean diet deconstructed by Rachel Laudan.
Fish in paddies: here comes the science.
Côte d’Ivoire to revive cacao cultivation. By building a research centre?
Pleasant, cultured and not so short foray into the history of the sugar industry in Kenya and Mauritius.
You say sweet potato. I say yam.
You say yam, so does Rhizowen, and yet … he’s talking about neither Ipomoea nor Manihot.
Urban agriculture thriving in DR Congo.

WorldFish director has a brand new blog with a fancy Latin tag. Expiscor: to fish out, to find out, and discover.
Cuba boasts home-grown Guardians of the Forests.
Promotion of Andean Crops for Rural Development in Ecuador. No idea what this is or why it popped up now, but worth sharing anyway.
Bioversity shares slides on The role of agricultural biodiversity in diets in the developing world: Improving diet diversity, quality and ecosystem sustainability.
IIED comes out for traditional methods to cope with climate change. Could we abandon this sterile dichotomy, please?