Jacob offers Luigi an explanation for Tunisia’s misplaced pride:
Seeds are being used as gifts to shape new social networks, the anthropologist in me guesses. Creating social capital, isn’t that worthy of praise?
Talking turkey data
So I was playing around with the agriculture data on WRI’s EarthTrends the other day. Actually it’s mainly — though not entirely — data from FAOStat, and there are the usual provisos about the methodology. 1 But look at what has been happening to turkey numbers in developed countries lately.
Numbers doubled between 2003 and 2004! Is that real? If so, what’s been driving the trend?
Tunisian genebanks starts to fill up
Help me out here. What is so “worthy of praise” about getting duplicates of several hundred wheat accessions from the USDA and ICARDA genebanks and putting them into another genebank? Surely the Tunisian genebank is up to much more praiseworthy stuff.
DIVERSEEDS puts out DVD
DIVERSEEDS is a scientific project supported fully by the European Commission´s 6th framework programme. We are “Networking on conservation and use of plant genetic resources in Europe and Asia.”
And I think we may have mentioned them before. Anyway, the latest news from the network is that they have a DVD out:
This documentary shows why biodiversity is important for agriculture and how it is conserved and used in many different locations in Europe and Asia.
The DVD costs about US$40, but you can get a discount if you order five or more. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t tell you much more about it. But the contents seems to consist of a series of fifteen or so short (average 3 minutes) films on a wide variety of agrobiodiversity conservation and use initiatives, ranging from the Austrian NGO Arche Noah, to the Thai genebank, to crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I’ll try to get hold of a copy and report.
Test your domestication knowledge
Kris’s Archaeology Blog at About.com:Archaeology has a challenging quiz about domestication. I got 15/20. You?