Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
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”
BBC slideshow on the wild apples of Khazakhstan. Malawi breeder decries genetic erosion. Bananas good for food security in central Africa. Well, yes. The ruminant family tree deconstructed. Public to help researchers locate wild honeybee colonies in Hawaii. “No Pesticides No Foreign Drinks.”
Making mesquite pancakes. The origin of hummus. “But militants on the one side and security forces on the other shot dead these dogs as they set off alarms at every movement. Now we are hardly left with any dogs.” “Sand food” is endangered, apparently.
After some kind words of encouragement for your faithful bloggers, as they plow their lonely furrow, Pablo unleashes hell on the genetic erosion meta-narrative: I hope we can finally move beyond the unsubstantiated pseudostats on worldwide erosion of crop genetic diversity, more important and easier to quantify would be how much is being used in …
I’ve blogged about ProMED before a couple of times. It’s advertised as a “global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases & toxins.” But it is actually a bit more than that, as a recent piece on cassava brown streak disease revealed. There have recently been some stories in the Ugandan popular press …
Continue reading “Why do we still not have an early warning system for genetic erosion?”