The BBC has a story about how google saved Kenyan farmer Zack Matere’s potato crop, and helped him find customers. Must be lots more similar experiences out there involving different aspects of agrobiodiversity. And, with the high-speed undersea cable poised to go live, no doubt there will now be many more from East Africa. Thinking of getting the mother-in-law on the tubes. She needs to sell her tea, potatoes, cabbages, what have you. Not sure, however, if the tubes will be able to take it. And she does have her mobile…
Time to chew
Time magazine must be on an agrobiodiversity high. First, yerba mate. Now, qat.
Happy Ethiopian New Year!
To all our Ethiopian readers: Enqutatesh! Melakam Addis Amet!
Marina of the Zabballeen does the rounds
We’ve blogged a few times about the plight of the Zabballeen — Cairo’s Coptic garbage collectors and pig-keepers — in the wake of the pig cull which was the Egyptian governments main response to swine flu. Now, via Treehugger, comes news of a movie about this embattled community: Marina of the Zabballeen. It seems to have done quite well on the festival circuit. If you caught it, let us know.
War of the roses
The oldest written testimony of the use of roses by humans originates from Mesopotamia. In the royal graves of Uruk, the cultural centre of the Sumerians (now ruins called Warka, in southern Iraq), Sir Leonard Wolley found cuneiform-script texts reporting on warfare by Sargon of Akkad (24th century BC) whose empire reached from western Persia to Asia Minor. Akkad crossed the Taurus mountains and brought back grapevines, figs, and roses…