Category: Commodity

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Brazil to market biodiversity

Under an Environment Ministry initiative in Brazil research groups have selected 775 species to encourage production and hopefully develop major markets. Read about it here:

Five books will be published this year, each dedicated to one of the five major regions of Brazil, containing the knowledge that has been accumulated about these “plants of the future”. Seminars for the business community will be held to spread the word about the potential of these plants, which are ornamental or used to produce foods, beverages, medicines, oils and perfumes.

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Olive oil spreads

There’s increasing recognition around the world that olive oil, as a key component of the so-called Mediterranean diet, is really good for you. The latest news is about its effect on ulcers. So obviously the traditional growing countries are trying to expand cultivation and production. But as this article points out, that’s not always so easy. Pity there’s nothing in the piece on varieties, though.

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The diverse crops of Kenya

I’ll be away for about a week so blogging might be a bit light, but I couldn’t resist mentioning the following four stories that were in the print edition of the Daily Nation this morning before leaving:

  1. A new climbing bean variety developed by the University of Nairobi and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has been released and will be ready for commercial production by June.
  2. Coconut vendors in Mombasa are set to have access to a new technology (developed by FAO in collaboration with the Intermediate Technology Development Institute) for keeping coconut juice fresh for up to 3 weeks.
  3. The vice-chairman of the Rift Valley branch of the Kenya Horticultural Society asked local universities to start breeding new flower varieties rather than using material from the Netherlands and Israel.
  4. A group of Nyeri farmers have started selling their coffee directly to international dealers rather than through the traditional central auction system.

I thought the range of these articles really gave an good impression of the great variety of Kenyan agriculture and agricultural research.

See you again soon…

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Boosting the Indian rice crop

A report in The Hindu says that scientists in the Indian state of Kerala want to increase the production of rice. Nothing special there. But the report does single out the need for “efforts on a fast track to survey, identify, catalogue and conserve all traditional plant varieties of rice as part of the measures to increase productivity”. Of course it does not say exactly how that knowledge will be used to breed better rice. But another paper at the Kerala Science Congress “Biodiversity of rice in Kerala” said that many of the traditional rice varieties offered a pool of resistant genes against insect pests. And a team of Kerala Agriculture University scientists, in its paper on the “Scope of crop diversification,” called for rice-based integrated farming system.