Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

A partial round-up of some of the many buckets of bits that have flowed across our desktops these past couple of days:

Ghana: “Mr Darko therefore implored the youth to use their exuberance to restore and enhance the environment and appealed to traditional rulers to support the enforcement on bye-laws against unfriendly environmental practices.”

Germany (via India): “He [German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel] noted that Indian farmers had cultivated 30,000 species of rice a century ago and that there were now just 30 left.”

Germany: “I’ll tell them that food and water are at risk. I’ll tell them that the 6 to 8 percent of GDP just on forests that we’re talking about is actually the total livelihood of 2 billion of the world’s poor. I’ll tell them that the fisheries that are basically going to die out in 40 years time don’t just mean $80 to 100 billion worth of lost fishing income, but also lost protein for the world’s billion poorest people. How are you going to cure the problem of health for these people? How are you going to provide income and a livelihood to the 2 billion poorest who depend on this?”

Germany — Klaus Töpfer, Man of the People: “[W]e need less paper and more concrete political decisions. The protection of species is not some luxury item by Gucci or Hermès, for people who have no problems.”

Cameroon: “[E]xperts drawn from the administration, university institutions and the civil society, discussed with diligence things to consider when carrying out agricultural activities in order to better preserve biodiversity.”

Zimbabwe: “Zimbabwe should conserve landscape (landrace? Ed.) varieties of its major food crops and also integrate biodiversity conservation in the agricultural sector to realise the benefits of dietary diversity and promote food security, the Minister of Environment and Tourism, Cde Francis Nhema, has said.”

Kenya: “From the perspective of facing the food crisis, developing agriculture biodiversity means understanding the diversity of highly nutritious traditional food system,” said Dr. Joseph Jojo Baidu-Forson, regional director of sub-Saharan Africa, Biodiversity International (Bioversity? Ed.).”

UN secretary General (via who knows where): “About a fifth of domestic animal breeds are at risk of extinction, with an average of one lost each month. Of the 7,000 species of plants that have been domesticated over the 10,000-year history of agriculture, only 30 account for the vast majority of the food we eat every day. Relying on so few species for sustenance is a losing strategy.”