Radio
David Williams interview
Dr David Williams, coordinator of the CGIAR's System-wide Genetic Resources Programme, is in California for Harlan II, a symposium at UC Davis honouring the great exploring agro-botanist Jack Harlan. He appeared on Insight, a daily in-depth interview programme hosted by radio station KXJZ in Sacramento, California. In the interview David touched on domestication, genetic modification, the history of collecting and the importance of crop wild relatives.
Listen here.
Bioversity Director General discusses the food price crisis
Emile Frison, Director General of Bioversity International, was recently interviewed by the French language service of Radio Canada. He explained some of the factors behind the recent rise in food prices and spoke of some approaches to tackle the problems, including more money for agricultural research for development and the need to use biodiversity to tackle malnutrition.
Antoine Kremer discusses EVOLTREE's achievements and future
Antoine Kremer holds a joint position at INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, and the University of Bordeaux. He is also the co-ordinator of EVOLTREE, a large Network of Excellence funded by the European Union. In this brief interview he tells Jeremy Cherfas about EVOLTREE's achievements and the discussions about its future that took place at its Governing Board meeting at Bioversity headquarters in Rome.
to the interview
Kenya's landmark nutrition and diversity meeting
Bioversity International's project to use dietary diversity to deliver better health in sub-Saharan Africa achieved another success recently. A high-level symposium brought together partners from across the spectrum of political and practical realms. Partners agreed to keep working together to put nutrition firmly on governnment policy, with two bills expected before parliament in the near future.Patrick Maundu, an ethnobotanist with Bioversity, has been involved in the project from the beginning. What were his impressions of the symposium?
Reflections on the Commission on Genetic Resources
Michael Halewood, Head of Policy at Bioversity International, offers his view on the recent meeting of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, a meeting he thinks may prove to be pivotal.
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The quinoa mill
A simple machine could save hours of drudgery for the women of the Southern Altiplano in Brazil and improve the nutrition of their families -- by reducing the time to process 12 kg of quinoa from about six hours to seven minutes. There's also a press release and a longer story.Damiana Astudillo, who helped develop the mill, recently talked about it.
Climate change and Crops
Bioversity scientist Annie Lane manages a large project on the conservation and use of crop wild relatives. She is also one author of the recent study exploring the impact of climate change on the survival of crop wild relatives. Jeremy Cherfas spoke to her on this, the International Day for Biodiversity, and began with an obvious question: why are crop wild relatives important?
Orange bananas to boost child health: Part 2
Last week Mike Davison reported from Cameroon on efforts to find varieties of bananas and plantains that are rich in carotenoids, the precursor of vitamin A. Deficiency of vitamin A is a serious threat to child health in Cameroon and elsewhere, so efforts at the African Research Centre on Banana and Plantain (CARBAP), coordinated by Bioversity International as part of the HarvestPlus Challenge Programme of the CGIAR, are vitally important. In the first half of his story, Mike Davison of Wren Media discovered how scientists are working to discover the best bananas and plantains to improve child health. At the same time, other researchers are working with farmers to improve the harvests, so that they are ready to supply the market.In the second part of his investigation, Mike Davison meets Cletus Fonbah, and together they visit Benjamin Ekame, a farmer who is working with the project.
as Mike picks up the story.
Orange bananas to boost child health: Part 1
Lack of vitamin A has serious repercussions on child health. In Cameroon, West Africa, for example, 10,000 children will die from vitamin A deficiency each year without treatment. Supplements offer one answer, but a more nutritious diet is probably a more sustainable solution. One source of extra carotenoids in the diet could be plantains and bananas. At the African Research Centre on Banana and Plantain in Cameroon, scientists like Dr Gérard Ngoh and Cletus Fonbah are working with Bioversity International to identify the varieties that could most easily supply the vitamin A people need. Bioversity sent Mike Davison to investigate. He began by visiting CARBAP's huge collection of bananas and plantains with Gérard Ngoh. How big is the collection?
In the next part of the story, Mike Davison goes with Cletus Fonbah to see how farmers are increasing their production of orange-fleshed bananas and plantains.
Cryopreservation
Many familiar crops can be safely stored for long periods of time as dry seeds. Conventional genebanks hold million of samples of such crop diversity. But there are also important plants -- for example fruit trees -- that cannot be stored this way. In Beijing, Bioversity International is working with Chinese scientists to develop storage systems based on very low temperatures: cryopreservation.Dr Zhang Zongwen is Bioversity's coordinator for the project, which uses liquid nitrogen to cool small samples down to minus 196 degrees celsius. Susie Emmett of Wren Media interviewed him about the process.
Note: The MP3 file is 4.5 Mb in size. Depending on how your computer is set up, it may start to play immediately, or you may need to save it and then listen with a media player program.
Straight talking on bent bananas
A listener to BBC Radio 4's Questions, questions programme wanted to know why bananas are curved and whatever happened to plans to develop a straight banana. Emile Frison, Director General of IPGRI, was only too happy to supply the answers.
Traditional leafy vegetables
With supermarkets reporting sales up 1100% in a little more than two years, it is clear that efforts to promote traditional African leafy vegetables -- at least in Nairobi -- are a success. At the other end of the supply chain are the growers who are learning to supply high quality leafy vegetables. And they depend on good sources of seed.Susie Emmett of Wren Media recently visited Kenya to record a story on the rise of traditional leafy vegetables. Her guide was Maryam Imbumi, a botanist who works with the Kenya Resource Centre for Indigenous Knowledge at the National Museums of Kenya, one of IPGRI's partners in the effort to promote better nutrition and health.
Note: The MP3 file is 3.8 Mb in size. Depending on how your computer is set up, it may start to play immediately, or you may need to save it and then listen with a media player program.Permalink
The magic of millet
A mini-mill that cuts the drudgery women face to prepare a meal is one of the secrets of a successful IPGRI project to promote the use of nutritious millets in India. There were good, short-term reasons why millet fell out of favour among poor villagers. Factories offered the farmers money to grow cassava for processing, and the cash crop displaced traditional grains such as millets. But the food that villagers bought to replace the millet they used to grow was not as nutritious as millet, which has many other advantages besides nutrition. It is thrifty and copes well with drought, and can fetch a good price in nearby towns. But it also takes long hours of work to prepare, hence the importance of the mini-mills.Susie Emmett of Wren Media visited the Kolli Hills in Tamil Nadu state to see for herself the results of efforts to restore nutritious millets, a project managed jointly by IPGRI and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation.
New Agriculturalist carried an article from her visit.Note: The MP3 file is just under 4Mb in size. Depending on your computer set-up it may start to play immediately, or you may need to save it and then listen with a media player program.
African Eggplant
Many developing countries are suffering what nutritionists are calling the double burden -- of obesity and malnutrition. Both are linked to a simpler diet in which refined carbohydrates and fats have replaced the vast diversity of traditional diets. In an effort to reverse this trend and improve the livelihoods of poor farmers, IPGRI launched a series of projects exploring traditional African leafy vegetables and how they can be made available to poor people. This benefits local farmers, who find a market for their produce, and city dwellers, who can buy good nutrition at affordable prices. It also protects the environment, because local species are often less demanding.African eggplant (Solanum macrocarpon) is just one of hundreds of species that people make use of as a "spinach". IPGRI has been working with farmers and the World Vegetable Centre to develop new varieties that are easier to grow and popular in the markets.Mike Davison of Wren media visited Tanzania and spoke to staff from the World Vegetable Centre who have been working with farmers like Elisamia Pellagyo.What persuaded him to grow African eggplant?
Note: The MP3 file is about 4Mb in size. Depending on your computer set-up, it may start to play automatically, or you may need to save it and then listen with a media player program.
Kenyan Gourd Museum
The bottle gourd (Lagenara sicaria) may well be the earliest domesticated crop. In East Africa they have long been used to make all sorts of containers, from tiny salt cellars to 50 litre water carriers. The unstoppable march of plastics and other new materials threatened the vast diversity of bottle gourds with extinction, until a group of women in Kitui district decided to step in. With help from IPGRI and other partners they collected as many varieties of bottle gourd as they could, along with the traditional knowledge to make use of this bounty. And they built a Gourd Museum, that acts as a seed store, education building and visitor centre. Susie Emmett of Wren media visited the Gourd Museum and spoke first to Francis Oundo, a community-based researcher working with IPGRI.
Note: The MP3 file is about 3Mb in size. Depending on your computer set-up, it may start to play automatically, or you may need to save it and then listen with a media player program.
