Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The cacao community is meeting in Ghana under the sponsorship of Mars to draft a plan for sustainable cacao farming in Africa:
Topics on the table range from multifunctional agriculture, genetics and germplasm, to pest and disease, and science and leadership.
I hope they will also consider the kind of value-adding that is being discussed at the just-opened annual Paris chocolate show.
During my recent trip to Syria I visited the world’s largest restaurant. I thought that was really cool and I wanted to at least mention it here, but could think of no excuse until a couple of stories appeared about a Middle Eastern food staple appeared in the news and I could resist no longer. I wonder how many olives the Bawabet Dimash needs to haul in every day to supply its 6,014 tables. Olive cultivation has really been booming in Syria during the past 20 years, expanding into large areas that were formerly little more than rocky pastures. I saw some huge newish plantations around Aleppo, for example. There are lots of different varieties in Syria, but I got the feeling that only one or two account for most of the expansion. These areas are likely to get drier with climate change, so I don’t know how sustainable the expansion is.
Meanwhile, further south, the olive harvest in the West Bank is being affected by some very unpleasant incidents. The olive is a mainstay of what remains of the Palestinian economy, and this is bound to impact people’s already sorely stressed livelihoods. I suspect not much of the West Bank’s production in currently being exported, but if and when it does start being marketed in Europe, it will have to cope with some sharp-nosed Italian police officers.
When we say that local varieties are valuable — and should therefore be conserved — we usually mean that they have rare and useful traits. We don’t generally mean that they actually cost a lot of money to buy. But that’s emphatically the case for Densuke watermelons in general, and the one that’s just been sold in particular.