Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 13, 2012October 12, 2012

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near

There’s quite a lot of metaphor coming out of ICRISAT lately, for some reason. First we had Genes of Gold, referring to the use that the centre has made of the biodiversity within its crops in developing new, improved varieties. Then today we have a video on the Jewels of ICRISAT, which includes a couple of the aforementioned new varieties, plus the genebank itself.

The genebanks of the CGIAR, of which ICRISAT is one, have of course on occasion been described as the crown jewels of the system. They cost $21 million a year or thereabouts. Which seems cheap for crown jewels. Especially compared to the sort of price tag people are putting on saving the whole of biodiversity, rather than just that part of it which feeds us all.

October 12, 2012October 12, 2012

Featured: EU regulations

Richard Hardwick points us to the full text (PDF, 23 pages) of that “[w]eird statement on genetic resources from EU Commission” we mentioned in a recent Nibble.

I think its from the people who promised “to explore the scope for developing a strategy for the conservation of genetic diversity.”

Right. So who’s going to read it for us?

October 12, 2012

Bean books bounty

Nice coincidence to get notice of two separate books on beans on the same day. The Fundación Herdez A.C. has El Frijol available for download from its website. Looks very thorough; and free. But in Spanish. Probably on the more popular side, you can also buy Ken Albala’s Beans: A History. Though I’ve just noticed this was actually published a few years ago. Nevermind.

October 10, 2012

Getting to grips with the botanical literature

Mark Nesbitt of Kew manages a very useful resource on how to access botanical and ethnobotanical literature on the web. Compare and contrast with a recent similar effort aimed at the prospective germplasm collector. If you want a laugh, check out how we used to do things back before online was even a word. And if you want to look into the future, Roderic Page is a useful guide.

October 10, 2012October 9, 2012

The cause of the problem …

… was a growing sensation that our RSS feed — served through Google’s Feedburner — could be a liability, as there are signs that Google is neglecting Feedburner. If you’re reading this in a Feed Reader, you might want to change the details to point to https://agro.biodiver.se/feed/ or just delete and subscribe again, which should pick up the feed automagically.

The bigger problem is the people who subscribe by email. We think we’ve sorted this out too, by adding all existing subscribers to a new list at MailChimp. If you are one of those, you should be seeing this message in an email. If you want to continue getting a daily update by email, there’s no need to do anything else. If you want to unsubscribe, there’s a link at the bottom of the email.

I hope that’s all …