Category: Featured

Afiniki Bawa Zarafi remains concerned about taro leaf blight:

Please what has been the finding of CABI/ Global plant clinic in respect to this coocyam leaf blight/ taro leaf blight? I am also interested in the result /findings of other scientists working on this disease.

And he’s right. More than a year ago in a comment to the same post Zachee Ngoko promised:

More information will come out as soon as available. Stay tuned!

Afiniki, and the rest of us, are still tuned. So what’s the news?

Michael says what Luigi was too much of a wuss to do more than imply:

These factsheets can be nice corporate/project hand-outs, if well done, but otherwise a waste of time. When I need information on baobab or other useful plants, I certainly will not go to an institutional website to look for factsheets. I google, and what usually comes up is a Wikipedia article (as for baobab) with oftentimes far better information.

Pat Heslop-Harrison can’t take it any more:

what are the problems? why is uptake of improved varieties slow? how are you coping with urbanization? who wants to be a farmer today?

Got the answer? An answer? Comment here.

Alan Duncan of ILRI responds to Luigi’s “could do better” on a database of forage in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are various “nifty ILRI tools” in development and I’m not sure that the SSA feeds database is the right one for what you’re suggesting. … The key issue is choosing technologies that deal with the major constraints: feed scarcity, feed quality and feed seasonality. And it’s also about much more than nutritive value – there are many other characteristics of feed technologies which will affect their suitability in different contexts. We do envisage a suit of tools to deal with some of these issues and will keep posting progress on the fodder adoption blog.

Good to know.

Diana weighs in on the whole hoe thing:

This could be a misprint and-or misunderstanding on the part of the writer? Though, even at the ‘correct’ price, hoes can be a major investment for poorer smallholders. That is the case here in Burundi, where a hoe may be shared by several families and is often included as part of an agricultural ‘package’. In the 19th century in central-east Africa, economic transactions were frequently carried out with hoes.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective.