Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
We get hours of amusement from poking holes in the many ways in which statements about the loss of 75% of agricultural biodiversity are likely to be less than accurate any way you slice them. But here’s an entirely new wrinkle. A friend recently wrote asking for some moral support for a grant proposal, which …
Probably way more than you want to know about food security in Yemen, but stunning nonetheless. NordGen tells us how to measure seed moisture content. In Russian. The Irish have benefited from at least one bank. Alas, that bank is Pavlovsk. Indian farmers turning their back on traditional crops because of climate change. Hope NBPGR …
Our innocuous post on genetic erosion in Georgia elicits consternation from Dirk at the lack of proper reference to previous work, support from Eliseu by analogy with a similar study in Portugal, and the usual diatribe from Luigi about the level of discourse on genetic erosion. But really, it was all about the threshing board.
André has a bone to pick with the non-circumspect quoting of numbers too: If the celebration of the Year of Biodiversity is a celebration and mourning of past century(ies), of course idyllic, agriculture and an occasion to bicker against modern agriculture – with little consideration for the challenges ahead, particularly in terms of conservation of …
So, Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, who teaches at the University of Louvain in Belgium and Columbia University in the United States, has been talking to reporters about the dangers of genetic erosion: He noted that in Sri Lanka in 1959, for example, some 2,000 varieties of rice …
Continue reading “Tracking down rice genetic erosion numbers”