According to the BBC, there’s a resurgence of jute cultivation in Bangladesh.
It’s not that long ago that the International Jute Organization could think it worthwhile to support, of all things, a herbarium survey of the wild relatives of the crop. I also seem to remember a very comprehensive germplasm collecting mission in Kenya in the 1980s, organized by the then IBPGR and funded by the IJO, though I can find no evidence of it. There is some germplasm in the international system, though not nearly as much as in national genebanks in Bangladesh and India. In fact, I seem to remember that the collection at the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute had some kind of international status at one point. I wonder if those heady days will now return?
No you are not imagining. There used to be one International Jute Organisation (IJO) (I think this has now become the International Jute Study Group) and under its auspices BJRI established a ‘global’ collection of over 7500 accessions of jute and allied crops way back in 1974. When we used to go to Bangladesh in early years of IBPGR establishment in APO we did visit this collection and I remember Jan/Arora had made some suggestions for the improvement of some of the genebank activities.
I checked my database, and you remember well, there has been a Corchorus collecting mission to Kenya (and other countries) in the 1980ies, but it’s filed as “germplasm collection in East Africa”. Go with ID number 453 and you find some documentation.
At a certain point in time, wasn’t Roy Denton based at IJO and collecting jute in the region?
Jute Renaissance? Could it be that the clever Bangladeshi’s see a great future in the attire of “sack-cloth and ashes” in these times of austerity in the western nations?