Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
You may remember a number of posts we did last year on the Monsanto donation of maize and vegetable seed to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake, and what Catholic Relief Services and others thought about it, which was, in a nutshell, not much. Now, via Truthout, comes news of an investigation by Haiti …
Continue reading “The latest on the Haitian seed donation controversy”
It hasn’t really taken all that long for the Jatropha backlash to begin. It is still often… …claimed to produce biofuel and enhance socioeconomic development while reclaiming marginal and degraded lands in (semi-)arid regions (Francis et al., 2005), without competing with food production or depleting natural carbon stocks and ecosystem services. But doubts are arising. …
Continue reading “In Jatropha cultivation, small is beautiful, boffins say”
The latest Plant Breeding News is out. There’s a huge number of interesting tidbits in it this month, including announcements for a number of major international conferences. But I’ll just highlight a web site that I think I may have linked to before but certainly bears mentioning again: PlantStress: …the purpose of this web site …
Greater investment in improving agricultural technology certainly needs to be part of the solution to meet the rising demand for food. But if spatially connective infrastructure (roads and bridges in particular) and complementary services such as agricultural extension are ignored, these findings from Bangladesh suggest that few farmers in lagging but potentially productive regions will …
A whole issue of the journal Biodiversity and Conservation looks at how cocoa production landscapes can contribute to biodiversity conservation. There are several papers on specific case studies and also an overview. Most of the discussion is — predictably — about what cacao cultivation can do for biodiversity, but, what about the other way around? …