Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Rahul adds some diversity to the debate about the cost of breakfast:
Cornflakes, toast, jam, eggs, coffee is breakfast? A ‘newspaper’ (as The Economist likes to call itself) that boasts a global readership should know better. In most of Asia that’s not breakfast. Vegetables are, rice is, noodles are, soup is, local cereals are. Orange juice indeed.
I’ll have what he’s having.
Look at the extraordinary photos by Tim Flach in the slide gallery here. 1 Then read this account of a new paper that examines relatively simple genetic diversity that underlies the extraordinary morphological diversity of dogs. Or do it the other way. Then marvel.
In England, the government is asking for views on vegetable varieties of ‘no intrinsic value for crop production but developed for growing under particular conditions’. They mean heritage and heirloom varieties, which could be promoted through Commission Directive 2009/145/EC on conservation and amateur varieties of vegetables, but we advise caution. Can worthless be far behind?
Seriously, let them know what you think.
Nourishing the Planet continues to disseminate answers. Today, Pascal Pulvery, of the National Association of Livestock & Artificial Insemination Cooperatives, France says:
“I think that the majority of funds should be used to develop the production of food for local utilization instead of developing the agricultural production for exportation.”
In other news, there’s a National Association of Livestock & Artificial Insemination Cooperatives in France.
The pack is well and truly on the scent now, with The Guardian in London and ABC in Australia weighing in, to say nothing of assorted ad-farms and feed scrapers. As they do so, strange claims are being made.
That Pavlovsk is “the world’s first global seed bank,” for example. It isn’t. But that does not diminish its importance of the Russian state’s short-sightenedness one bit.
And that “[t]welve Russian scientists starved to death at the site while protecting the crops”. They didn’t. They starved to death at the VIR’s headquarters in Leningrad proper.
Nits being picked, I agree, just as I’ve previously picked the “seed bank” nits. The heroism of the past is important and should never be forgotten, but it detracts from the argument that collections like Pavlovsk are even more important for the future. The forest fires raging in Russia during the hottest summer on record by far will burn themselves out. The need to adapt food and farming systems to climate change, using the genetic diversity of places like Pavlovsk, will not.