Nibbles: Slow evening, Chillis, Wild potato, Thresher
- An Evening of Conversation with Carlo Petrini: “I found it both inspiring and frustrating.”
- A retired employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lopez, 70, is not your typical chile farmer.
- Wild potato confers resistance to root-knot nematode. Ask for it by name: PA99N82-4
- A simple machine for threshing sorghum and millet in developing countries. Go team!
Nibbles: Farmer suicides, Mexican drink
- Vandana Shiva on Indian farmer suicides.
- Make mine a tejate.
Ramie ruminations
Not a day passes that I don’t utter an imprecation — as Julian Simon Barnes did in print a few days back — at agrobiodiversity. Take yesterday. There’s a big meeting going on this week at FAO, and they’ve set up a series of stands in the atrium. Most of them are pretty boring, just piles of publications and the odd poster, but the one put up by the people behind the International Year of Natural Fibres is very nice indeed.
It has examples of handicrafts and other products made from a whole lot of different fibres, from abaca to muskox. Including ramie. And that’s when I cursed the neverending-ness of biodiversity. For what, pray, is ramie? I know abaca and muskox, but I’d never heard of ramie.
Well, it turns out to be Boehmeria nivea, a shrub in the nettle family widely cultivated in East Asia since antiquity for its bark, which is used to make fabrics. The IYNF website has a page about it. The Korean national costume (the hanbok) is made of ramie cloth, so we’re not talking about a minor, obscure, criminally underused plant here. Bloody agrobiodiversity indeed. I hate you.
Nibbles: Taro, NTFP, Maca, Perils of new crops, Nabhan, Cockfighting, Old wine, Maya nut, Cassava Brown Streak Virus
- University of Hawaii’s work on taro summarized.
- Watch out for FAO’s new NWFP-Digest. Non-timber, non-wood; what’s the difference?
- The transition of maca from neglect to market prominence. Free download.
- Maize and malaria in Ethiopia.
- Gary Nabhan interviewed. Again.
- NPR on the limits of the Green Revolution.
- Cocks still fighting in India.
- The early Egyptians “…were very aware of the benefits that natural additives can have—especially if dissolved into an alcoholic medium, like wine or beer.”
- Brosimum alicastrum to the rescue.
- Uganda’s biofuel hopes dashed by virus? Say it aint so.