households that have diversified their farming activities, growing food crops for their own consumption, cash crops for sale, and keeping livestock, have found it easiest to escape from poverty
households involved in business and trade have also been successful, though this option has only been open to households in better-connected villages with initial endowments of land and other wealth
good health and extensive trust networks have helped households move out of poverty
illness and agricultural shocks have important negative effects on everyone, except the most well-off
Good news, you might have thought, unless you were loaded for vampire.
Flickr photo by Skymonger Ah, but the power of the intertubes. Bob has raised an old thread from the dead by providing more information about Luigi’s Nibble that “Amadumbe being sold to supermarkets in South Africa“. Some readers may not notice good stuff in the comments (one reason we like to feature a comment from time to time) and so we’re elevating Bob’s latest comment to a post.
I am currently based in New Zealand and have access to Taro in a few varieties , via the Pacific Island communities, one of which is the wild version, which has notably black stems. This is not true of Madumbi, which also has a flower very similar to the Arum. I would be very keen to grow the South African variety as it is a very different flavour to the common Pacific Taro which as previously noted is very bland. Here is a link to a picture of the flower …
I did some more Googling, and found out a bit more about the project and its originater; depending on the story that’s either “Dr James Hartzell, a self-proclaimed ‘white boy from New York’,” or Professor Thembinkosi Modi, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Agricultural Sciences. (Modi won a TWAS (Third World Academy of Science) Young Scientist Award in 2007.) Whatever, the end result was an organic cooperative of growers sending the amadumbe (or amadumbi) to a supermarket chain. Everything seemed rosy, with farmers reporting higher incomes that they were using to improve their lives, buying better houses, medical care, and education for their children. Except that there seems to have been a worm in the amadumbe: free-riders. Who were they?
Members who were male, poorly educated, partially certified, aware of loopholes in the grading system, and who did not trust the buyer.
The authors of the paper quoted above make specific recommendations to deal with the problem, but I cannot discover whether anything came of them. I’m also no aroid taxonomist, and frankly I’m not sure how informative the flower photo is, 1 but there you have it. Now, maybe other people can chime in with more information.
The word is Zulu, but also is also anglicized as Madumbe as in Zulu the “A” is almost silent. The plant is a Taro species grown in Natal and Eastern Cape in South Africa and looks more like the common Arum than the tropical Taro, the corm looks like the Arum corm. Just boiled it is delicious, unlike the Taro which is rather bland.
What we really want (obviously) is a binomial. Anyone?
Approximately two-thirds of Africa’s population labors on small, dusty farms, frequently failing to produce enough food to feed their families. Europe, North America, and Asia got their “Green Revolutions” and the ensuing productivity growth allowed small farmers to send their kids off to school in the big cities. Africa completely missed the boat.
A long article in the New York Times Freakonomics blog by Dwyer Gunn asks “Will the Green Revolution Ever Hit Africa“? It’s long, and very straightforward. While giving the naysayers a hearing, the article is firmly on the side of GMOs, fertilizer and irrigation. Oh, and forward contracts to supply the Gates Foundation’s 2Purchase for Progress program, cooked up so that the World Food Programme can buy emergency rations locally, injecting some cash into local economies. Because the two thirds of Africa’s people who labour “on small, dusty farms, frequently failing to produce enough food to feed their families” are going to be entering into forward contracts with WFP? Do me a favour.
I started reading the article in full optimistic flood; here was somebody who understood the issue, really understood it. I finished very, very disappointed. Round up the usual suspects. Luckily there were only three comments, and only two really annoyed me, 3 so here’s my suggestion. Go there, but leave your comments, if you have any, here. Or, at the very least, in both places.
