Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Jacob van Etten has sent in this post, with the following disclaimer: I contributed one of the articles to the issue and participated in a preparatory workshop. My own addition to this issue highlights the role of ICT technologies to create new networks of collaboration around technological innovation, creating new links between scientists and farmers. …
Continue reading “Africa’s Green Revolution: A report from the barricades”
More from a participant at the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes” at CATIE in Costa Rica. The ecologists at the Wallace Symposium today waded deeply into the functional role of diversity in agricultural systems. How much diversity do we need in order to get …
I must confess to having some sympathy with Helen Hughes’ scathing critique of development in the South Pacific, but she goes too far, surely. For example, with reference to one of the Millennium Goals, she says that “The ending of hunger” amounts to a stock diet of sago and stringy sweet potato. Population pressure, plus …
Continue reading “Overstating the case against the Pacific development paradigm”
Lots of Indian rice in the IRRI genebank. Any of it being used to develop drought-tolerant varieties? Lots of journalists in the Tunisian genebank. How they make coffee in Ethiopia. How they make popcorn the world over. You sometimes get popcorn (or popped sorghum) with coffee in Ethiopia, now I think of it. And since …
Here’s how Jeffrey Sachs starts a recent article in Scientific American: Life at the bottom of the world’s income distribution is massively risky. Households lack basic buffers — saving accounts, health insurance, water tanks, diversified income sources and so on — against droughts, pests and other hazards. The bodies of the poor often lack enough …