Where indeed.
Via.
IUCN on Flickr
IUCN has some nice new photos up at Flickr. I don’t really understand the eco-fashion ones, there are no crop wild relatives among the “Celebrating biodiversity” ones, 1 and, though there is a nod to agriculture in the set on adapting to climate change, the captions could be better. But that’s all just quibbling, and a bit of sour grapes, no doubt. I don’t see us in agricultural biodiversity doing any better.
Markets, and getting to them
Conservation International publishes Food Security Strategy
Conservation International’s blog has a post on the problems faced by pollinators. A nice enough summary, but what struck me was the mention of CI’s new Food Security Strategy.
As a part of CI’s new Food Security Strategy, CI recognizes the critical role that native pollinators play in food production. The conservation and promotion of native pollinators is an excellent demonstration of where synergies between food security and healthy ecosystems can occur.
You can find more about it on another blog post. Will it be another agriculture-is-the-enemy diatribe? Maybe not. Something else for the to-read list.
More agrobiodiversity Web 2.0 stuff
Following that piece a few days back about how social networking can help taro breeding, I posted a note on GIPB‘s Plant Breeding Forum in a thread about the usefulness or otherwise of producing a directory of plant breeders. I suggested that rather than a conventional directory some kind of social network might be called for. After a certain amount of toing and froing it emerged that there is in fact a Plant Breeding and Genetics Network on Linkedin. It was set up by David Feldman of Monsanto last year. Interesting enough, but what I was really thinking of was something more specifically focused on exchanging information on germplasm, rather than on breeders, as a way to move beyond germplasm databases 3. Any examples of that out there?