There are three stories on honey in the latest NWFP digest. Did you know there are more than 300 distinct types of honey produced in the US? But I bet none tastes like the stuff collected by the Baka Pygmies. Or like the type that Solomon Island farmers are being encouraged to produce more of. I can vouch for this last one, it’s pretty good.
Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club launched
Just in from GBIP.
The GIPB Knowledge Resource Center is launching the Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club, a virtual place that allows communities to meet and critically evaluate plant breeding and related fields’ articles in the scientific literature.
This e-Journal Club is directed to professionals and students interested in discussing relevant plant breeding themes and issues.  Its majors objectives are to help improve skills of understanding and debating current topics of interest to plant breeding and to promote intellectually stimulating and professionally rewarding exchange with colleagues from around the world.
This e-Journal Club will use Fireboard, a forum component fully integrated to the GIPB website, which allows implementation of many e-Journal Club groups simultaneously. Dr. Fred Bliss kindly agreed to serve as the convener of this first GIPB e-Journal Club, which will discuss the article “Quantitative Genetics, Genomics, and the Future of Plant Breeding†by Dr. Bruce Walsh.
In order to participate you just need to follow the instructions in the front page of the GIPB website. Registration is now opened and the e-Journal Club will start on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.
Please, note that discussion in this first e-Journal Club will be held in English, but proposals of conveners willing to start e-Journal Clubs in other languages can be sent to gipb@fao.org.
Biodiversity Festival
This just in from Crocevia.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Rome. We are very proud to present you the fifth edition of the International Audiovisual Festival on Biodiversity, a funded project of Centro Internazionale Crocevia taking place in Rome on 24th and 25th October.
The Festival was born to promote experiences and activities that NGOs and local partners worldwide are carrying out to protect the environment and, in particular, its biodiversity. During the festival, national and international documentaries related to the environment, biodiversity and food sovereignty will be presented, followed by performances of local artists famous for their social commitment and special attention they give to the local traditions.
For the first time this year, the participating documentaries will be also available on-line on ARCOIRIS TV http://www.arcoiris.tv/. During two weeks before the official event in Rome, the audience will thus have the chance to see the videos and participate at the festival by choosing their favourite documentary.
We would like you to promote among your partners or in your website the festival and video request, as we would be pleased to include your last works in our event. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for further request or info.
Best regards,
Centro Internazionale Crocevia
Agrobiodiversity hits the mainstream
Want proof that sustainable agriculture is firmly on the radar of the mainstream press? Newsweek has a piece this week on how Andean potato farmers are adapting to climate change. While Time sings an ode to the American “urban agricultural boom.”
Mangroves all over the place
For some reason, there’s been a spate of mangrove stories lately. First there was a PNAS paper about the value of Mexican mangroves. That’s behind a paywall, but it was enthusiastically picked up, including by National Geographic and SciDevNet. 1 The latter followed-up with a story about mangrove planting not being done right in the Philippines, based on a paper in Wetlands Ecology and Management. That was also widely picked up, and occasionally given a local slant, as for example in Abu Dhabi. Yesterday there was a story from Fiji. And there have been questions in the Pakistani parliament.
Maybe the media interest has to do with the International Wetlands Conference, which just closed in Brazil. Predictably, participants
…warn[ed] against creating energy and food croplands at the expense of natural vegetation and of carelessly allowing agriculture to encroach on wetlands, which causes damage through sediment, fertilizer and pesticide pollution.
But of course there’s a lot of agriculture that takes place within wetlands:
A recent study shows a large wetland in arid northern Nigeria yielded an economic benefit in fish, firewood, cattle grazing lands and natural crop irrigation 30 times greater than the yield of water being diverted from the wetland into a costly irrigation project.
And climate change is expected to have a devastating effect:
According to South African research, an estimated 1 to 2 million rural poor in that country alone could be displaced as wetlands dry up, placing further strain on urban centres to create accommodation and employment.