A long story in The Guardian describes how pineapple growing is turning sour in Costa Rica. There’s an introduction about how Del Monte’s more tasty and nutritious Gold variety, bred by Hawaii’s Pineapple Research Institute in the 1970s, replaced Smooth Cayenne in the 1990s. But the real point of the article is to expose the dreadful conditions endured by workers on a Costa Rican plantation servicing a number of major British importers, mainly supermarkets. There are also serious environmental concerns over the recent expansion of the crop in the country.
You say potahto
Isabel Vales, a potato expert at Oregon State University, is using both molecular and conventional methods to breed pest and disease resistance, and evaluating thousands of traditional and specialty potato lines, including weirdly coloured ones, for their potential under organic conditions.
Ice cream: one hump or two?
Food manufacturers in Rajasthan, India, have created an ice cream made of camels’ milk. At a recent tasting, an Italian, no less, apparently described it as “an absolutely delicious desert treat”. Tommaso Sbriccoli, said it “compared favourably with the gelato-frozen desert in his home country” according to Daily India.
The serious point to all this is that there has actually been remarkably little selection for milk production in camels. That means an enormous diversity in how much herders can get from a female. I remember visiting a researcher in a desert country who was trying to improve matters, because a small decrease in the variation in milk production would make an enormous difference to the amount of milk poor nomads could get from their beasts. That idea crops up again from time to time but I’ve no idea whether any great progress has been made. Do you know?
Support for sorghum and millet research
The International Sorghum and Millet Collaborative Research Support Program (INTSORMIL) based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln “works to improve nutrition and natural resource management and to increase income in developing countries, while developing new technologies to improve sorghum and pearl millet production and its use worldwide.” CropBiotech Update recently announced that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has given INTSORMIL a grant of US$9 M to continue enabling “plant breeders from U.S. land-grant universities to work with researchers in host countries through education, mentoring and collaborative research.” Sounds very worthy, but I must admit I hadn’t heard of this outfit before.
You say you wanna revolution
An interesting juxtaposition of articles: from India, one of the cradles of the Green Revolution, the National Commission on Farmers (NCF) says that the government should now focus on “faces before figures” (net income of the farm families rather than tonnes of farm commodities produced), while from Africa, which was largely bypassed by said revolution, a call for a new, uniquely African Green Revolution with a focus on nutrition and the environment as well as markets and policies.