Never rains but it pours. Mars and Nestle jump on the ethical cacao bandwagon.
New book on bananas
Banana book sees light of day-o; Harry Belafonte unavailable for comment.
Ethiopian farmers beating pulses
Reuters has a video (about 7 minutes long, and you’ll need a fast connection) about farmers in Ethiopia turning to beans and other pulses as a replacement earner for coffee, which has been buffeted by global production shifts. The hero of the story is Hailu Worku, who does indeed seem to be a pretty impressive farmer. But he has 20 hectares. How typical is that of the “smallholder” farmers that a government spokesman says are the ones growing all those beans for export? And I wasn’t clear from the video whether the farmers are growing beans as part of a rotation with their grain crops. The story mentions an Italian company that is buying up lots of beans for export and a farmer cooperative, which returns 70% of profits to the farmers. Hailu Worke sells to both; now that’s diversity as insurance.
African Coffee Research Network endures
Having been in at the birth of the African Coffee Research Network fifteen years ago or whenever it was, it’s nice to see them making the mainstream African press. On the other hand, the list of things they are planning to do looks remarkably like the one we came up with at the early meetings. Fifteen years ago.
Nuts for makapuno
The redoutable Coconut Google Group has a great story from Roland Bourdeix about the Philippines’ makapuno coconut variety, ((Now, you may have to join the Google Group to read Roland’s post. But that would be no bad thing.)) drawing from an article in the Philippine Star. Makapuno nuts have a delicious and very valuable jelly instead of water, but can’t germinate. A makapuno palm will only have 15-20% or so makapuno fruits. The only way to get makapuno nuts is to plant a normal coconut from a palm with makapuno fruits and harvest that precious 15-20%. But that meets only 3% of demand. So in the 1960s Dr Emerita de Guzman came up with a way of rescuing makapuno embryos in tissue culture. When she planted the resulting seedlings, all the coconuts were makapuno. There are now nine labs in the Philippines churning out makapuno seedlings, but they’re expensive and few farmers can afford to buy them. I’ll let Roland tell the rest of the story, but here’s a little spoiler to whet your appetite: tissue culture makapuno palms were planted on a kind of artificial island in Thailand and something wonderful happened there…