https://twitter.com/RiceResearch/status/930374790480723968
Always good to see a politician visiting a genebank.
And that 18,161 should be 18,163 now I guess.
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
https://twitter.com/RiceResearch/status/930374790480723968
Always good to see a politician visiting a genebank.
And that 18,161 should be 18,163 now I guess.
Dioscorea bako (EN, IUCN) #OviGasy the most yam apprecieted by Menabe #Madagascar people and cultivated and conserved through the KMCC project @TeamKMCC pic.twitter.com/kmCRruuXlK
— Mamy Tiana Rajaonah (@RajaonahMamy) November 10, 2017
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.
Follow the fun in all the usual ways, both from Cali and Ibadan. And for a focus on the genebanks, in those centres and all the others, there’s always the Genebank Platform website.
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.