Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Nice video. Note the reference, towards the end, to the systematic characterization of AfricaRice‘s collection of 2,500 Oryza glaberrima accessions. Interestingly, Genesys says the Centre has 3,796 accessions. I wonder what’s happened to the rest. Here’s a map of the 863 accessions from 129 sites with georeferences.
LATER: Compare with the map of African rice cultivation in Diana Buja’s post.
This time it’s the president of Vietnam. There are 2797 accessions from Vietnam in the IRRI genebank.
It is easy to mock the various conferences, emergency meetings and seemingly endless policy documents that have tried to mitigate the threat but so far have achieved little. In fairness, though, responding effectively will be extraordinarily difficult. Despite what some conspiracy-minded critics have alleged, the crisis has a number of drivers, each one of which would be challenging enough on its own, but which taken together seem to call for a radical restructuring that is hard to imagine in the current political climate.
These drivers include the diversion of grains in North America and Western Europe to biofuel production; higher energy costs, which translate into more expensive chemical fertilizers; and since 2000, financial speculation over staple crops, which causes price fluctuations.
From an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune by David Rieff, who is writing a book about the global food crisis. Well worth reading in its entirety, and although he doesn’t judge between the competing metanarratives — technofix vs agroecology — he is optimistic that there will indeed be a solution. On that, I’m not so sure.
The rip-roaring yarn of Indiana Appleseed in the Canyon of Lost Treasure in the Boise Weekly, when posted to Facebook, elicited a reference from Mike Jackson to a BBC Midlands news item about the hundreds of apple varieties in Herefordshire, and the role of Thomas Andrew Knight, president of the RHS from 1811-1838. That sounded really interesting, but the BBC website doesn’t allow me to watch that particular video clip here in Italy. Fortunately, Herefordshire Council has no such compunctions about freeing its content, which allows me to mark the fact that 2011 is Herefordshire’s Year in the Orchard before the end of the year in question, if only just. Having said that, the BBC did have an article back in June on the Great British Apple in connection with another programme, in which “[h]orticulturalist Chris Beardshaw uncovers the British contribution to the history of our most iconic fruit.” And it looks like I’ll be able to watch at least some bits of that.
The 21st International Pepper Conference is coming up. Well, sort of, it’s in a year’s time, November 4-6, 2012 in Naples, Florida, USA. I wonder if self-described seed capitalist and Tabasco aficionado Tom Adlam will go. Or at the very least “friend” the Facebook page. No sign of a blog, though, which is increasingly de rigueur these days at conferences, nor a Twitter hashtag. Early days, I guess. However, you can already sign up, clunkily, for an email newsletter.
