Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
According to Mastroberardino, wine played a central role in the lives of the Vesuvian people. Archaeological excavations, botanical studies, and the discovery of casts of vine roots and their support stakes have confirmed that vines were grown within ancient Pompeii’s city walls, in the gardens and orchards which beautified villas, and especially in the quarters located on the outskirts of the city, near the amphitheatre.
Cary Fowler clarifies matters:
Just to be clear, Svalbard does NOT impose SMTA requirements on countries that deposit. (Cases in point: the 69,000+ samples deposited by the U.S. and the 2,000+ deposited by the Seed Savers Exchange, an NGO.)
Treaty Parties and non-Parties alike are making use of the Seed Vault and use by non-Parties does not change the legal status of those deposits at all.
You can believe that if you want to.
Are you working in a university which includes or is intending to include a course on food composition in its curriculum? well, if so, you might be interested in this recent announcement from INFOODS coordinator Ruth Charrondiere on FAO’s nutrition listserv.
I am pleased to announce that FAO/INFOODS is developing an e-learning course on food composition which is intended mainly for universities to easily incorporate food composition into their curricula. It will also be useful for self-learners and food composition courses. The e-learning course will supplement the FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Study Guide and its accompanying 12 PowerPoint Presentations (see http://www.fao.org/infoods/infoods/training/en/). It will be available in English. You will be able to download it free-of-charge from the INFOODS website and receive it on CD. We intend to launch it at the 10th IFDC in Granada.
So now you have no excuse for not documenting food composition data at the crop variety level.
Jeanne Osnas is not content to rest on her leaf-eating laurels:
I would love to know more about the plant species composition of regional diets around the globe. It would be amazing to put this information into a “master greens tree,” so we can evaluate the relative contributions to the greens tree of cultural history of plant use and the organismal and evolutionary biology of the plants themselves.
There has to be a way to make this a crowd-sourced effort …
Sometimes disparate things demand to be linked together, no matter how tenuously. So this morning, I see first that the G8 countries are following up on their 2012 promise to build a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition by holding a conference at the end of April on Open Data for Agriculture. The intention is to build a “global platform to make reliable agricultural and related information available to African farmers, researchers and policymakers, taking into account existing agricultural data systems”. And fine though that is, I can’t help feeling that helping African and other farmers to gather and share their own data might actually make a bigger contribution to food and nutrition security.
Then, it turns out that Howard Buffett’s foundation is supporting two ventures that promote food security in Africa (and elsewhere) a little more directly. First, there’s a spread in excess of 550 ha in Cochise County Arizona, where researchers can try ideas in an environment rather like the one that many African farmers endure.
The Cochise property focuses on farming as it’s done in Africa, where animals pull plows and most seeding is by hand. Two oxen will test equipment that will be used in different parts of the world. Researchers also use the oxen as they try to develop a new system to plant seeds at the same time the animals plow the land.
And Arizona isn’t the only place where Buffett is keen on draft animals. He also supports Tillers International, which teaches farmers around the world to use draft animals.
“What we’re doing now is conservation farming, an effort to provide more tools to deal with climate change,” [Dick] Roosenberg [Executive Director of Tillers International] said. “To me, the most exciting thing is the people we pick up from farms who are bright but not formerly educated and we put tools in their hands that allow them to do amazing things.”
“We see what someone is doing in South Africa and move it to Uganda, or Madagascar to Haiti,” he said. “We’re bouncing around the world as a catalyst.”
Conclusion: Sure it is good to have big governmental conferences to promote open data for agriculture. But would it hurt to do more in the way of actually working with farmers to improve their techniques and share successful approaches?