Check out this video taken for the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog by El-Sayed Mohamed El-Azazi, Executive Director of the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank at the North Sinai Research Station. The Bank was severely damaged by looters during the recent political turmoil. El-Azazi confirms that the tissue culture and molecular labs were destroyed and all the computers stolen, but that the seeds in the cold room are all still secure because the looters did not enter that section of the facility.
Egyptian Desert Genebank- video footage of destruction from Crop Trust on Vimeo.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
