AVRDC just announced “SEAVEG 2014: Families, Farms, Food – Regional Symposium on Sustaining Small-Scale Vegetable Production and Marketing Systems for Food and Nutrition Security“, to take place 25-28 February 2014, in Bangkok, Thailand.

The objective of the symposium is to examine how policies and practices to sustain small-scale agriculture — vegetable production and marketing in particular — can improve availability of and accessibility to safe and nutritious food, as well as contribute to better nutrition and balanced diets, thus enhancing the socio-economic development of ASEAN member states.

Please visit SEAVEG 2014 official website for more information.

In collaboration with UNCTAD, GIZ and other partners, CFF has recently completed this wikibook on biotrade. Biotrade concerns the local, national and international trade in physical goods derived from native biodiversity, including agricultural species. The wikibook covers concepts relevant to biotrade, explores the benefits and risks associated with it, as well as the frameworks and factors enabling it.

What surprised us in putting together the wikibook is the complexity and enormous economic importance of biotrade, which is under-reported because of biotrade’s multi-faceted, dispersed and oftentimes informal nature. Compiled data suggest that global biotrade is a multi-billion US$ industry, probably in the middle double-digits.

Another issue that caught our attention is the growing share of agriculturally produced biotrade materials, in particular from the farming of wild-type species, as described in the wikibook. There is no shortage of standards and guidelines for the sustainable extraction of biotrade materials from natural habitats, but typically the combined effect of relentless market demand, unscrupulous traders and poor gatherers and hunters, depletes the resource base. Thus, many herbal and other plant and animal materials are becoming scarce from the wild and need to be farmed.

We have previously reported on the participation of our colleague Mei Jiun Kwek at the Wikimania 2012 conference – this year’s international gathering of Wikipedians. On this page you can meet a few of the tens of thousands of volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia. CFF is proud to see that a feature of Mei Jiun’s work has been included.

In this video she explains her excitement about the value of contributing images of minor crops to Wikimedia Commons, often the only images covering particular species. However, she also notes that many researchers from other agricultural research organisations “are just not excited to do that because they prefer to develop their own database, they prefer to upload the picture to their own organisations’ websites. They prefer to publish their knowledge in physical books, rather than contribute that idea to Wikipedia. Actually, I believe in the agriculture community or in the researcher community, they are not aware of the potential with working in Wikipedia”.

Clearly, persuading our community to share their information and material in public repositories is still an uphill struggle, but it is one CFF will continue to be engaged in. In early 2013, Mei Jiun will publish a resource page on our website, designed to provide guidance on the use of Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, and Google Books, and most importantly to explain how volunteering content on underutilised species to these repositories benefits contributors. Stay tuned!

If you are looking for nutritional information on underutilised plant species, we warmly recommend the databases curated by the International Network of Food Data Systems (INFOODS) hosted by FAO. The excel files downloadable from this global data repository currently hold compositional information on several hundred species of roots and tubers, fruits, edible seeds, and other edible plants. Data are referenced to the original analytical work, and most importantly, compilers have gone to great lengths to flag data that appear to be implausible or otherwise conspicuous.

You can now help INFOODS to expand the coverage and depth of its nutritional information on agricultural biodiversity in the following manner:

Firstly, you are welcome to check this inventory of underutilised species, which INFOODS has developed in the past in collaboration with CFF. Please nominate any species that is not yet included in the list, but should be so, provided it satisfies the following conditions:

Foods/species that

• were/are/could be used for human consumption;
• may have great potential for contributing to food security and nutrition;
• are mainly local and traditional crops/animals (including insects, amphibians and reptiles) and whose distribution, biology, cultivation and uses is poorly documented;
• receive little attention from research, farmers, policy and decision makers, technology providers and consumers;
• have weak or no formal seed/animal germplasm supply systems;
• are farmed, reared, gathered or caught on a small scale.

Species that are imported into a particular region do not count as underutilised there.

CFF is happy to compile your nominations for species to be included in the INFOODS list, and pass it on to INFOODS in a consolidated form. However, to do so, we need both the local and scientific names of your nominations. These should be sent to email hidden; JavaScript is required by 1 February 2013.

Secondly, we encourage you to submit any relevant compositional data to FAO for inclusion into the INFOODS Food Composition Database for Biodiversity. Only data that is fully documented can be accepted. For submission and more information, please contact Ruth Charrondiere at FAO.

SEARCA Graduate Scholarships are open to applicants from Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Vietnam who are regular employees of academic, research or government institutions and not more than 35 years old. The topic of research for thesis/dissertation must be in line with SEARCA’s current priority themes:

1) Natural Resources Management
Focuses on management of land and water resources; biodiversity management for food security; and risk assessment and the impacts of climate change on agrobiodiversity

2) Agricultural Competitiveness
Addresses agricultural competitiveness, food security and rural poverty alleviation, natural resources management

Click here to see the universities that qualify for study posts.

Applicants may submit the applications to the respective Ministries of Education of their countries before 30 July 2012.

Click here for the detailed application procedure.