The recently established CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has issued a call for projects on “gender, climate change, agriculture and food security“, which is highly relevant to R&D regarding under-utilised crops. CCAFS will award women scientists enrolled in a PhD program or interested in a post doctoral opportunity, and who are citizens of and affiliated with an institution in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Bangladesh, India, or Nepal, with a research grant of $35,000. Proposals must:

1. Demonstrate and contribute to understanding the linkages between climate change and gender more specifically, while developing policy-relevant findings on climate change, agriculture, and food security more generally.
2. Build research capacity of women scientists in partner institutions and increase their representation in agricultural research.

Proposals must be submitted by 1 May 2011. Thanks to Hannah Jaenicke for alerting us to this opportunity.

AP – In this photo taken Oct. 25, 2010, a man cleans quinoa grain in Pacoma, Bolivia.

An article in the New York Times (Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary at Home) on the growing popularity of quinoa outside Bolivia, a major producer country of this native Andean chenopod grain, has sparked this interesting discussion (The quinoa story: it’s complicated). Among other things, this  seem to suggest that demand for quinoa in international markets is contributing to malnutrition in producer countries, as price hikes render quinoa unaffordable for the poor. This is rather implausible. Well before the recent quinoa craze, quinoa consumption among the urban poor in producer countries has been very low or non-existent, and quinoa has not been very popular in rural households producing the crop for commercial purposes. If anything, the growing fame of quinoa as a foreign exchange earner and the news of its nutritional excellence are likely to stimulate consumption in producer countries. Previously unavailable in restaurants, quinoa has now been discovered by high-end eateries in Lima, Peru. Because of the export boom, the grain is featured in national media, which will eventually lead to greater popularity and awareness of culinary/nutritional benefits. We have seen it before with other Andean crops: it was international interest in yacon and maca that has brought back these crops from the brink of extinction into the nutritional mainstream.

In response to the increasing demand for capacity building on spatial analysis of biodiversity, Bioversity has just launched a training manual for practitioners who work with biodiversity data and want to develop spatial analysis skills. Spatial analysis is an important tool for gathering information about the geographic distribution of plant diversity  in specific areas or around the world.   The manual, authored by Scheldeman and Van Zonneveld is a terrific product. It relies on free software, explains step by step how to download it, use it, how to import data and perform quality control, produce distribution maps and many more useful spatial analyses. We are really impressed! You can download the manual  here. The manual is a part of other training materials available from Bioversity.

Dr Sean Mayes, Associate Professor in Crop Genetics at the University of Nottingham on Global food security UK web site tells us about the value of diversification and the importance to rely also on underutilized species, more capable to cope with water constraints and other issues brought by climate change.

Read bout it here