Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I am, I confess, very confused by two items I read yesterday. The first is an extensive report on India’s readiness to deal with the UG99 variant of wheat rust disease. The headline declares India’s wheat immune to Ug99, but on alert. Making allowances for the difficulties faced by sub-editors the world over, I read …
There’s something happening out there; what it is ain’t exactly clear. Over the past few days several people seem to have been talking in mystified terms about biodiversity; what it is, why it gets so little respect, what to do about that, whether it matters anyway. On Monday Luigi nibbled an IEED paper on biodiversity …
Scientists at the USDA Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research Unit at Aberdeen, Idaho, have been combing old records in their search for wheat that may be resistant to UG99 and other types of stem rust. Nearly 8500 accessions from all around the world have been tested since 1988. Those tests did not include UG99, …
You may remember the recent warnings about a new strain of wheat stem rust called Ug99 making its way from the Rift Valley of Africa across the Red Sea to Yemen, thus threatening the very home of wheat in the Middle East. Jeremy blogged about it a couple of months back. Well, resistance to the …
Science magazine today publishes a paper about mapping the geographical spread of diseases. The key point is that different diseases spread in different ways, and recognising that should make prevention more effective. It would be possible to run an entire blog on the emergence of diseases. Going well beyond the World Health Organisation’s monitoring systems, …