Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Beer news

In Uganda, the Finance Ministry recently cut the tax on beers made from local ingredients. Nile Breweries responded by dropping the price of its Eagle and Eagle Extra beers, made from local sorghum.

Mr Onapito-Ekomoloit said the company was taking the move in the “interest of strengthening Uganda’s agricultural base through sorghum farmer development.”

Win-win-win. I’ll drink to that.

Meanwhile, on another continent, a newly-brewed sorghum beer suffers “a pervasive taste of iron. Not like sucking on a rusty nail but its definitely there”.

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Nibbles: Old maize, News, World Bank, Organic, Bees, Breeding, Svalbard, Genebank management, Cattle, Fibre

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Give ’em a phone

Why don’t coffee growers get more for their beans when world prices are higher? First off, I had to admit, I didn’t know that they didn’t. But apparently even against a background of rapidly rising prices, growers do not get much more. A new study of coffee growers in Uganda explains that rising prices brings out so-called “ddebe boys”, part-time coffee traders who “insert themselves between farmers and larger permanent traders and mills”. The ddebe is a 20 kg tin that they use to purchase coffee from farmers who are ignorant of the true market prices. The obvious solution is to give farmers access to current market information.

Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill, who conducted this study say they don’t know whether this would solve the problem, but that it deserves to be looked at. I agree. There are already NGOs working with Ugandan farmers via mobile phones, and we know that phones make markets more efficient, so I hope someone gets going on this soon. As for the ddebe boys, I expect they too will find a way to make a living. Maybe by sending SMS spam?

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Smell this

Will perfume smell more delicious if the labdanum in it has been scraped off the beards of Cretan goats?

Ah, how I love to meander the byways of economic biology. Who knew that Cretan rock roses (Cistus creticus) produce a resin called labdanum? That labdanum, among many other uses, is a base note in perfume not unlike the fabled ambergris? Or that the best quality labdanum is gathered adventitiously, as it were, by goats grazing on Cretan herbage (rather like that civet-cat coffee)?

I didn’t either. But now you can too, thanks to the Human Flower Project.

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Energy special

Hot on the heels of our concerns about carbon sequestration, biofuels, biochar, EGS and all that malarkey,  The Economist has a special issue this week on  Alternative Energy. 1 And what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Let a thousand flowers bloom.