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Three good ideas

I think I have already pointed out that Nigel Chaffey does an entertaining round-up of botanically themed items from the world’s media on every issue of Annals of Botany. The latest one has three stories — on training, innovation and information — of great relevance to some of our recurring obsessions here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

  • “Teaching Tools in Plant Biology is a new, online feature of The Plant Cell consisting of materials to help instructors teach plant biology courses. Each topic includes a short essay introducing the topic, with suggested further readings, and a PowerPoint lecture with handouts. The materials are peer reviewed by leaders in the field to ensure accuracy, like all material in The Plant Cell.” Anyone want to volunteer to do one on agrobiodiversity conservation?
  • InnoCentive, the global innovation marketplace, “where creative minds solve some of the world’s most important problems for cash awards up to $1 million,” is to tackle the problem of the European corn borer, though the solvers of this one get only $20,000, and must relinquish all intellectual property rights. Will be interesting to see if anyone bites. The deadline for submission just passed.
  • Annals of Botany is going to take part in a project “to establish whether content in various formats from disparate sources (e.g. literature from publishers and data from public databases) can be delivered to a central ‘knowledge brokering service’, which then makes the content machine-readable and allows key pieces of information to be extracted by data-mining approaches.” I really like this idea as a way of aggregating information on germplasm accessions, data from databases but also published results from papers etc.
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Featured: Livestock

Ford reminds us that, if you’re going to feed the world, there’s more to animals than meat and milk:

There are some other potential benefits to using animals, despite their intrinsic inefficiency. They can buffer food supply: build up herds in good years, eat them (and any grain they would have eaten) when crops fail. See “Future Harvest: pesticide-free farming” (or similar title) for other benefits: growing more soil-conserving forages becomes more economic, graze weedy fields rather than building up weed seed bank, etc.

That title? Future Harvest: Pesticide-free Farming (Our Sustainable Future).

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Geographical indications to preserve Ethiopia’s biodiversity

From André Heitz.

Ethiopia is one of the frontrunners in the use of Intellectual Property to make the best use of its plant genetic and traditional knowledge assets. In the absence of legislation on geographical indications, it has endeavoured to use collective trade marks in the main export markets to add value to its Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar/Harar coffees. There is more on the Ethiopian Coffee Trademarking and Licensing Initiative at the Ethiopian Coffee Network and Light Years IP.

The Ethiopian Parliament is now expected to pass geographical indications legislation later this year. This will then provide the legal basis for Ethiopia’s plans to register geographical indications protection, first nationally and then abroad, over emblematic home garden products like coffee, beans, spices and condiments or aromatic plants.

The Home Gardens of Ethiopia project says:

Biodiversity is under threat everywhere, and Ethiopia is no exception.

This country features an exceptional biodiversity, and its gardens, shaped generation after generation by rural populations, represent a unique natural and cultural heritage that must be handed down to future generations.

To preserve this horticultural heritage, Ethiopia has chosen to design and implement an effective institutional and promotional tool: a Geographical Indications system.

The “Home Gardens of Ethiopia” project seeks to promote and develop native horticultural productions, while preserving in situ the biodiversity of the country’s gardens. Its approach is both original and efficient: to offer farmers communities legal protection and help them promote selected native products with new marketing opportunities. Ethiopian farmers will be able to make their traditional modes of production more sustainable, and preserve the biodiversity of which they are the custodians.

We’ll keep fingers crossed.

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Ancient Egyptian toffs were wine snobs

An article in The Independent a few days ago on daily life in ancient Egypt included this intriguing snippet of information.

Similarly to today perhaps, wine was the booze of choice for high society individuals. Fine wines were labelled with the date, vineyard and variety as the tax assessors requested, such as the ones found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see a list of ancient Egyptian grape variety names…

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Podcast on food as history

Guests Tom Standage, business affairs editor of The Economist and author of An Edible History of Humanity joined Eric Tagliacozzo, associate professor of history at Cornell University and author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier and award-winning culinary expert Julie Sahni, author of Classic Indian Cooking to discuss food as a driving force behind economic expansion, industrial development and geopolitical competition.

And you can listen to the podcast, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.