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Malagasy yams win internet

Seeing this amazing yam on Twitter reminded me that it’s about time I gave a shout-out to the project “Conserving Madagascar’s yams through cultivation for livelihoods and food security,” being coordinated by Kew with funding from the Darwin Initiative. It’s really active on Twitter, as you can see, but has also been churning out scientific publications. What I can’t quite figure out is whether there’s a formal ex situ conservation component, and perhaps even some linkages to breeders of cultivated yams.

LATER: The best way to follow the exploits of the yam team in Madagascar is to use the hashtags #AprilTrust and #OviGasy.

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Agriculture Action Day, it says here…

And FAO is all over it:

The impacts of climate change on food systems are a fundamental threat to humankind. Climate change disproportionately affects smallholder and family farmers, pastoralist, fishing and forest communities, who provide the bulk of our planet’s food. At the same time, agriculture contributes almost a quarter of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The event will highlight successful actions that contribute to agriculture-based solutions for addressing climate change in livestock, traditional agriculture systems, water, soil, food loss and waste, and integrated landscape management, and also includes sessions on climate data and Climate-Smart Agriculture. The sessions will feature successful interventions to ensure implementation and link the 2018 Facilitative Dialogue with the longer-term goals of the Paris Agreement. Young farmers will follow the event and present their impressions of the proposed agriculture-based climate solutions during the opening and closing plenaries.

With a bit of luck, the events on climate-smart agriculture and on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, at least, will feature the role of agricultural biodiversity. But who can tell.

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The way ahead on nutrition?

While waiting for agriculture to do that transformation thing, it may be worthwhile reading the latest Global Nutrition Report. Although some metrics are moving in the wrong direction, I found some comfort in this observation:

…‘triple duty actions’ which tackle malnutrition and other development challenges could yield multiple benefits across the SDGs. For example, diversification of food production landscapes can provide multiple benefits by: ensuring the basis of a nutritious food supply essential to address undernutrition and prevent diet-related NCDs; enabling the selection of micronutrient-rich crops with ecosystem benefits; and, if the focus is on women in food production, empowering women to become innovative food value chain entrepreneurs while minimising work and time burden.

So what’s stopping us?

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Agriculture hoping to transform itself, and COP23

So, the UN Climate Change Conference, otherwise known as COP23, has started here in Bonn, and we’re trying to make sure the voice of agriculture is heard, on the fringes if nowhere else. The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is busy touting its vision for an agricultural transformation under climate change. With a bunch of partners, they’ve organized a series of side events on the different dimensions that such a transformation will entail, including, perhaps most relevant to us here, the role ofcrop breeding and improvement. All the usual social media channels are in play, so follow along, and send in your questions and harangues.