Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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The chocolate formerly known as lost

The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate is an engaging story in Smithsonian Magazine about Ecuador’s ancient, iconic Nacional cacao. It was published three years ago, but I only just came across it. It rang a bell, so I went back through the archive. And there was lots more there than I suspected. Again in celebration of our twentieth anniversary, let’s go through it.

It all started in 2009, when Jeremy first described how witches’ broom had devastated Nacional cultivation in the early 1900s, how breeders responded, and how farmers eventually widely adopted the more productive and resistant, but much less tasty, new variety known as CCN51. Nacional basically disappeared.

But not totally. In 2011, we Nibbled the rediscovery of Nacional populations in northern Peru by a USDA team, as reported in the N.Y. Times. A glimmer of hope, perhaps?

In 2015, Jeremy returned to the story. We learned that more than half of Ecuador’s cacao trees were then CCN51, which of course made the industry again vulnerable to the next disease. And, even worse, that the chocolate they produced tasted like “rusty nails.”

But now — thankfully — comes a much happier chapter, nicely described in the Smithsonian piece.

Encouraged by the discovery of Nacional in Peru, a motley crew of conservationists, chocolate makers and agricultural scientists went looking for it in Ecuador. In 2013, they found a grove of century-old trees in a coastal valley called Piedra de Plata. DNA showed that nine of 47 trees they sampled were genetically pure Nacional. They established them in a field genebank in 2018, and started producing planting material for interested local farmers.

More than 30 families are now working … to reforest their lands using seedlings from the nearly extinct tree. The rebirth of this once-lost treasure isn’t just a miracle for the chocolate-loving world — it’s also a milestone in reviving the rich heritage of Ecuador’s coastal forests and farming. And it may even offer hope for saving other endangered trees worldwide.

The plan was that within three years the nursery would be producing 5,000 Nacional seedlings annually. That would be about now. Alas, I was not able to find an update, but I do hope they’re on track.

The moral? Conservation pays — especially when what you’re conserving makes chocolate that doesn’t taste like rusty nails.

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Cassava, revisited, and revisited again

Cassava has been a persistent thread through this blog since the beginning. It first appears as a staple with a dark side: capable of keeping people fed, but also of causing a nasty disease under some conditions. Over time, it resurfaced repeatedly, showing how one crop can illuminate many of the key issues in agrobiodiversity conservation and use. As part of our anniversary celebrations, let’s pull some posts out and see how that might work…

An early post we called Detoxifying cassava looked at the complex ways konzo epidemics in Africa are linked to the consumption of bitter cassava. A later Nibble pointed to a very digestible (sic) introduction to cassava and cyanide. And Manihot esculenta, I presume? widened the lens historically, drawing on Dr Livingstone’s Zambesi Expedition papers to show how he understood cassava’s diversity, its promise and its danger back in the day.

Several posts over the years have looked at how well we now know and conserve the diversity of the crop. Gaps in cassava collection in Africa highlighted sounded an alarm: eastern and southern Africa seemed to be under‑represented in international genebanks. Later, More on cassava germplasm from Brazil and an earlier post compared the geographic distribution of CIAT’s genebank holdings with the that of both accessions and cultivation in Brazil, illustrating how national and international collections overlap — and where they don’t.

A post on safety duplicating germplasm collections explained the mechanics of backing up diversity, using Embrapa’s genebank as a concrete example. It also included a reference to the global cassava conservation strategy, during the development of which I got schooled on the diversity of the crop. And a paper on sources of pest resistance in cassava we included in a Brainfood showed the value of genebank holdings, identifying landraces in CIAT’s global collection with resistance to thrips, mites, and whiteflies.

This particular arc culminates in a summary of two papers on 50 years of cassava conservation at CIAT, which looks at that genebank from both ends: what went in over five decades, and what actually came out in breeding. A recent Nibble notes that cassava’s diversity is spread across multiple genebanks, and why that’s a good thing, up to a point.

Then came the TME 419 saga: Is there more than one TME 419 cassava? unpacked confusion around an IITA genebank accession number; I say TME 419, you say TMe‑419 revisited the same named clone in Nigerian fields years later. Another intricate tale centred around how some modern varieties got their resistance to post-harvest rotting. Spoiler alert: a wild relative was involved.

Genebanks, however, are not the full story. Cassava’s diversity also has to survive in farmers’ fields, where diseases constantly test its resilience. An early post, Ho hum … another deadly disease, placed cassava brown streak virus (CBSV) alongside then emerging threats like Ug99 wheat rust. CBSV was duly much in the news a few years later in 2011, and we were of course all over it, though not always one hundred percent correct in our judgements. That’s what the comments are for.

A Nibble on cassava pests questioned the crop’s “indestructible,” Rambo-like image as new problems appeared in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. An experiment on cassava degeneration, Twitter‑style focused on what to do about the widespread viral infection of cassava planting material across Africa, which badly affects performance. And a Nibbles roundup on cassava bad and good news captured an apparent mismatch between FAO worry and CGIAR optimism back in 2011. Maybe we should do an update on that, now I think about it.

Another theme has been how the crop is promoted, produced, and woven into everyday food systems today. In Cassava on a roll? I traced production ups and downs in Kenya, intrigued by seeing new products in supermarkets on my return to the country. I followed that up with The flour of Kenyan agrobiodiversity marketing, which shows cassava (with finger millet) being used to diversify staple flour, connecting conservation to real products and diets. And a Nibble on Ugandan cassava from a couple of years back highlights local innovation in value chains, if you interpret it charitably. No doubt all part of the African cassava revolution touted by Forbes in a 2023 Nibble.

I hope this roundup of our past encounters with cassava, incomplete as it inevitably is, has given you a little taste of what twenty years of this blog have been about: following stories as they unfold, picking up old threads, occasionally digging really deep, other times not deep enough. Do search for your favourite crop in the archive, and tell us what you come up with.

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Brainfood: Nutrition edition

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Two legends of agricultural transformation

Land sparing is a seductive story.

Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky land sharing business. Everybody wins.

A new paper in Agriculture and Human Values calls this a “policy legend”: a complicated and contested body of research gets turned into a simple, reassuring story about technology and intensification. The politics of who owns land, who benefits from intensification, what gets produced and where, and what happens to rural livelihoods very conveniently disappear from the equation.

But the other side of the debate has its own temptations. Agroecology as a movement is often explicit about context, politics and food sovereignty. Yet it too can occasionally shrink to something that’s cosily tidy: conventional agriculture is the problem, agroecology is the solution, here are some desirable practices, get farmers to switch.

Another new paper, this one in Ecological Economics, also makes that story look way too simple. And you know how we love that here. The authors look at 2,721 farms in six African countries and find very different starting points for the transition to agroecology, and different trajectories. The smallest farms tend to combine autonomy and income diversification; larger farms more often go for some crop-livestock integration; small and medium farms may put more land into legumes for soil health.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The way farmers make decisions is complicated. And I coincidentally came across a study in Food and Nutrition Bulletin that illustrates that rather well, albeit on a small scale. Surveys of 26 farmers in the Ecuadorian highlands found that they grew diversity for economic reasons, sure, but also for social, emotional or health and safety reasons. And, rather wonderfully, sometimes simply because they liked it.

Farm size, labour availability, markets, tenure, risk, access to inputs, knowledge, household objectives and yes, sheer aesthetics, all shape what farmers can do, are willing to do, and indeed eventually end up doing. Change one part of the system, and you can change the economics of the rest.

So why do we keep reaching for legends?

Simple stories are useful, I guess. They fit snugly into funding proposals, policy briefs and campaign slogans, and every camp needs something to organise around. Unfortunately, agriculture is way messier than the legends we tell about it.

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Nibbles: Historical photos, Belgian pears, Miombo fruits, Kenya seed treble, Nepal landraces, Women

  1. Haga Hideo’s 1950s photos of Fukushima farming rituals are now being used to revive them: ex situ conservation, but for culture.
  2. Long before photography, or “pre‑breeding” was a buzzword, Belgian pomologist Jean‑Baptiste Van Mons was running massive pear selection trials and gifting us Beurré Bosc and Doyenné Boussock.
  3. As Southern Africa’s miombo woodlands shrinks, scientists are cloning wild trees so the fruit — and food security — outlive the forest. Now for the pre-breeding.
  4. Greenpeace Africa’s Seed Project makes the case for indigenous seeds as a route to farmer independence. And you can help.
  5. And oh so coincidentally, a network of community seed banks in Kenya is rescuing indigenous seeds so the diversity is still around when opportunity (or crisis) knocks.
  6. Also in Kenya, the national genebank’s collectors are racing to secure opportunity crops.
  7. Nepal’s indigenous crops and landraces are at the same time more needed than ever, and under threat. So, much like in Kenya.
  8. The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT says women are at the center of sustainable food systems; the fine print adds: “as they have always been.”