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100 things I’ve done: agrobiodiversity edition

You may have come across the “100 things I’ve done” meme. Jeremy succumbed to it, and a lot of fun it was too reading about it. I’ve just come across a somewhat more specialized version, by a geologist. Maybe there’s room for an agrobiodiversity version? If so, here are ten things that I think should be included, off the top of my head. I haven’t done them all, but I hope to, some day.

  • Harvest (or buy in the supermarket) and then prepare and eat a dish of traditional leafy greens in Africa.
  • Botanize crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent.
  • Talk cassava cultivars with the inhabitants of an Amazonian village.
  • Take part in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony at the coffee field genebank near Jimma.
  • See volunteer sweet potato seedlings being protected in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
  • Visit the Vavilov Institute.
  • Walk through a milpa at harvest time.
  • Look at potato varieties and wild relatives around Lake Titicaca.
  • Visit the Ifugao rice terraces.
  • Make the pilgrimage up to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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Aluka on agrobiodiversity

Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. ‘Aluka’, is derived from a Zulu word meaning ‘to weave’, reflecting Aluka’s commitment to connect resources and scholars from around the world. In 2008, we announced that Aluka is uniting with JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization building trusted digital archives for the global scholarly community.

An amazing resource, which has a section on African plants, including crops and their wild relatives, e.g. Sorghum.

Access to some things (e.g. photos of herbarium specimens) “is provided through participation by not-for-profit institutions of higher education, as well as secondary schools, public libraries, museums, and other research or cultural institutions across the globe.” Is anyone out there a member? Tell us about it.

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Turkey offers D-8 agrobiodiversity conservation help

There’s a bit of follow-up on the news from a few weeks back that Turkey was planning to build another genebank. At a meeting of the D-8 countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Nigeria), Turkey’s Agriculture and Rural Affairs Minister Mehmet Mehdi Eker proposed that “the seed bank to be established within D8 countries be housed in Turkey.” So it will be a sort of regional backup facility? Hard to say. The plot thickens.

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New Scientist on how to get through the next 100 years

An article in New Scientist tells us how to survive the 21st century, what with climate change and all.

There’s a paragraph on agriculture 1:

Since water will be scarce, food production will need to be far more efficient. Hot growing seasons will be more common, meaning that livestock will become increasingly stressed, and crop growing seasons will shorten, according to David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues (Science, vol 323, p 240). We will need heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, they suggest. Rice may have to give way to less thirsty staples such as potatoes.

The interactive map also has stuff on agriculture. Check out in particular Southern Europe, where, apparently, “[a]lthough agriculture will be largely impossible, hardy animals such as goats will be kept on the fringes of the desert.”

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Who you gonna call?

If you’re in the Pacific region and you’ve got a problem in the following areas, that is:

  • Animal health & production
  • Biosecurity & trade facilitation
  • Crop production
  • Genetic resources
  • Forests and trees
  • Forestry & agriculture diversification
  • Information & communication and extension
  • Plant health
  • Agriculture & forestry policy

SPC, that’s who, by email. Great to see my old colleagues in the Land Resources Division in Fiji setting this up. It builds on the pioneering work of PestNet in the region. Best wishes to them all.