24 March 2009

From its offices in France and Costa Rica, Bioversity has begun implementing a 3-year project focusing on Musa grown with coffee in Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru. Funded by the German Organization for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), the project involves the collaboration of 20 institutions, including CATIE, CABI, CIRAD, Promecafe, INCAE and INIA.

16 March 2009

Dr. Stephan Weise will replace Richard Markham as the Director of Bioversity’s Commodities for Livelihoods Programme.

17 March 2008

The ProMusa network—established in 1997 by Bioversity to provide expert support to the world’s (very few) banana breeders—has a new website featuring discussion fora, an electronic newsletter, an e-mail alert for registered users and commenting facilities to express opinions on individual articles.

24 October 2007

The destruction in 2003 of Iraq’s Abu Gharib national genebank could have been a disaster for genetic resources conservation in an area where the ‘Fertile Crescent’ provided the cradle for domestication of cereal crops. The impact of this loss was, however, mitigated by the existence of a ‘black box’ collection at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria, where seven years earlier Abu Gharib scientists had sent seeds of the 200 most valuable varieties for safe-keeping.