News

Luigi Guarino

The US Affordable Care Act has proved complicated, divisive and controversial, but it will help to protect people against disease and medical misfortune. The world’s crops have the same sort of health problems....

Luigi Guarino

I’m not saying for a moment that the world of crop diversity conservation is anything like a screwball comedy. But I do sometimes wish meet-cutes happened in that world as Billy Wilder would have written them.

A...

Luigi Guarino

Getting a chenopodiaceous Andean pseudo-cereal on a coffee shop menu is as difficult as it sounds. My friend Stefano Padulosi is endearingly self-effacing about this achievement in a recent blog post extolling the...

Luigi Guarino

The fact that this year – on June 20, to be precise – the ten-yearly Earth Summit roadshow (or the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, to give it its full moniker) is returning to where it all...

Luigi Guarino

The Copenhagen Consensus sounds like a minor Robert Ludlum novel – perhaps something from his unjustly neglected, more sedate late period – but it’s actually far scarier. The consensus is that of economists, about...

Luigi Guarino

Good vs Evil. East vs West. Capulets vs Montagues. Barça vs Real. We like to deal in such binary choices. It makes life so much easier. None of that groping around in the grey shadows of doubt. Love it or leave it....

Luigi Guarino

Californians flipping through the news over their organic, high-fibre muesli must have spluttered orange juice all over their shiny new iPad3s. Huanglongbing has come to their state. This nasty disease -- also known...

Luigi Guarino

What you – and they – are looking at is a small fraction of the world’s largest collection of bean diversity. You can admire it, like these guys are doing, at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, whose...

SAN JOSÉ, COSTA RICA (7 April 2011)—Crop specialists in Central America announced today that a major rescue effort is underway in one of the heartlands of ancient agriculture to regenerate thousands of unique varieties of coffee,...

Luigi Guarino

The financial woes of Ireland are regularly in the news these days, though a respectful respite seems thankfully to have been observed recently, perhaps in honour of St Patrick’s Day. But the country has gone through...

Luigi Guarino

Genebanks: what are they good for? While the answer is rarely the emphatic “Absolutely nothing!” of the anti-war song, ambivalence – or worse – about the usefulness of genebanks is expressed more often than one...

SYDNEY (22 October 2010)—Hoping to save the vulnerable varieties of bananas painted by the artist Paul Gauguin, rare coconuts, and 1,000 other unique varieties of staple fruit and vegetable crops across the Pacific, crop...