Getting the new issue of CropBiotech Update in my inbox today, and noticing at least a couple of crop improvement items I would like to blog about at some stage, prompted a reflection on sources of information on the use of agricultural biodiversity in breeding.
Produced by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), you can get CropBiotech Update delivered by email once a week or check out the website here (where you can subscribe to an RSS feed or sign up for the email alerts). FAO also has a news service in biotechnology, which you can check out here. You can sign up for monthly email alerts, but I couldn’t see any RSS feeds, unfortunately.
Somewhat broader than either of these, but with some overlap, is Plant Breeding News, sponsored by FAO and Cornell University. You can sign up to the email alerts, consult the archives and learn how to contribute here. BIO-IPR is an irregular listserver produced by GRAIN. It focuses on PGR policy issues, and you can find out more about it here.
Finally, I just wanted to mention an example of a national-level agricultural research newsletter which provides information on breeding programmes, DIDINET News from the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) in Papua New Guinea. DIDINET stands for “Didiman/Didimeri Network” or a network for scientists and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector. There must be lots of other examples of such national newsletters. I wonder if someone has compiled a list.
And of course I haven’t mentioned the various ways the CGIAR Centres disseminate information about crop breeding, such as this one, for example. But maybe Jeremy will say something about that. He knows more about it than I do.
I don’t really have any specific information about CGIAR newsletters about crop breeding; some centres have them, others do not. But one interesting occasional newsletter is produced by ECO-PB, the European Consortium for Orgqanic Plant Bereeding. I’d love to be able to give you a link, as Luigi has, to a subscription site, but ECO-PB’s web site is, shall we say, a little disfunctional. So just go to the site, click on Newsletter, then subscribe to the Newsletter, and you’ll be given a chance to stick in your email.