That’s the title of the European Plant Genetic Resources Conference 2011, organized by Eucarpia, and on right now in Wageningen. Are you there? Can you tell us about it? We would particularly like to know the answer to the question “Whither genebanks?” asked by our old mate Geoff Hawtin. Oh, and here’s a note for the organizers: our blogging and twittering services come quite cheap.
The VIR Department of Biotechnology, Pushkin
The VIR Department of Biotechnology, Pushkin, a set on Flickr.
You may remember a post a few months back at Vaviblog describing a paper on the Vavilov’s Institute’s potato collection. I recently had the pleasure of meeting one of the authors, Dr Tatjana Gavrilenko, for the first time, and in her natural habitat to boot. Here are the results.
Behold, the coconut!
Myths and legends surrounding the origins of food are, not surprisingly, very common. Here’s a new one on me: according to one story, deftly told by Roland Bourdeix on one of his blogs, the island of Niue — the Rock of Polynesia — owes its name to two very special varieties of coconut. But don’t take my word for it; read Roland’s post.
Are there other places named specifically for foods? And is there some central repository of myths and legends that involve agriculture and food? I don’t know of one.
Six-horned Semien sheep
Couldn’t resist posting this photo of a truly weird sheep.
That elusive nutritional impact
Maybe it’s all the nutrition stuff going on here and at Vaviblog lately, but when I finally tried to catch up with a couple of papers from the recent special issue of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability on “Sustainable intensification: increasing productivity in African food and agricultural systems,” one thing struck above all else. And that was that both in the case of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes in Uganda and indigenous African vegetables in East Africa, there is still no evidence of a nutritional or health impact of adoption of that particular agrobiodiversity.
Ex ante predictions, sure. Economic impacts, plenty. Even in some cases nutritional impact of the same intervention (those orange sweet potatoes) in another place (South Africa). Maybe the impact on health and nutrition is there and just hasn’t been measured, or it has been measured but hasn’t been published yet. Or maybe it’s just too early for such an impact to have manifested itself. But when it comes to the specific agrobiodiversity cases of sweet potatoes in Uganda and traditional greens in East Africa, it seems to me that the biggest documented impact of so far has been on income.
Will someone out there set me straight? Please!
Oh, and since I’m at it, there’s a paper out by an old friend from the Pacific on a quick method of measuring some nutritional variables in sweet potatoes.