The “Livestock based Geographical Indication chains as an entry point to maintain agrobiodiversity” Expert Meeting will be the third in the serious of events that FAO have recently organized in order to raise awareness about the importance of traditional products and their role in agriculture and rural development and agro-biodiversity preservation. The Budapest Expert meeting together with the South-East Europe Technical Seminar “Quality Food Products linked to Geographical Origin and Traditions” hold in Belgrade, Serbia in December 2008 and the Technical Forum “Geographical Indication and its contribution to Food Security” hold at the Berlin Forum International Green Week in January 2009, have the objective to constitute an important knowledge base for practitioners, scientists and decision and policy makers for their work related to geographical indications and rural development.
Building on coconut
The World Bank’s Development Marketplace 2009 is continuing to feature stories from the winners on its web site. And that’s good because we can scan them as they come up and draw attention to those that involve agricultural biodiversity. Today’s pick, a project from Samoa to build traditional houses “as models of ‘safer, accessible, resilient, and sustainable housing'”.
What’s particularly nice about this is the idea that traditional Samoan houses depend absolutely on agricultural products like the coconut fibre rope that people use to lash the components together. Modern houses built from steel reinforced concrete and corrugated metal cannot withstand cyclones, and their materials become deadly flying objects during storms. Hence the “innovation” of rediscovering traditional methods and material. Might help conserve coconut diversity too, I suppose.
Oh, and in case you were wondering about more obvious, though no less traditional, things to do with coconuts, why not download Coconut Recipes, from Bioversity International and COGENT?
Round ’em up
Cattle rustling is rampant in Northern Ireland, 1 Uganda and the US. Is it the economic downturn, or did it never go away?
Featured: Pawnee Corn
Tony IDs some Pawnee Corn:
The center ear on the left picture appears to be the Pawnee Blue flour, a blue-black flour corn with ears 8″ to 10″ long, usually 8 rowed, plants 6′ to 8′ tall, 110 day variety.
The center ear in the right picture looks like Pawnee Red Flour corn, color light red, ears 6″ long.
This kind of thing is one of the absolute best bits about the internet.
Purple pride
Purple sweet potato fries? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. Anyway, let Ted Carey try to convince you.
“The CIP breeder sent me about 2000 seeds from crosses between purple parent plants that looked promising for regions like ours. In 2007, we planted those seeds at K-State’s John C. Pair Horticulture Center near Wichita. Each seed had the potential to be a unique new variety.”