- UK breeders scour ICARDA’s fava beans for better genes. What next? Chianti?
- Olive cultivation then and now. An archaeologist speaks.
- Entomophagy.
- Lager yeast origins.
- Salvia divinorum: underutilized no longer.
Exploring a Sarajevo market
I spent an interesting hour or so with Elcio exploring an open-air fruit and vegetable market in central Sarajevo last week. I think it is the very same market which was tragically attacked during the war with much loss of life. No sign of that now, thankfully, except for a memorial to the victims.
You can see some pictures of the fruit and vegetable diversity on display on my Flickr page. Here I just want to point out two curiosities. Or at least they were to me. Here’s the first.
This lady is selling necklaces of dried, perhaps immature but certainly small, okra fruits, called bamia in Bosnian (and indeed in Arabic for that matter). They are soaked in water and vinegar for a few minutes, then added to fried onions and meat to make a local stew. Or that’s what a lady buying some told us. I bought some and will try it. I’d never heard of okra being used in this dried form.
The second thing that came as a surprise to me was this fruit. Sorry I don’t have a decent picture of it being sold in the market.
Clearly some kind of Physalis, perhaps P. alkekengi? It was being sold a few fruits at a time, so probably for medicinal purposes (LATER: or as ornaments?) rather than food. I couldn’t communicate with the lady selling it, the only one in the market. Any ideas?
Nibbles: Value chains, Growing local
- Value chain analysis — how beans get form Guatemala to Costco. CIAT involved. Huge story.
- Brilliant. Via Aguanomics. Sky Vegetables.
Bosnian bee-fest
Spent the whole week in Sarajevo for a meeting, but did get a chance to explore on Friday morning. Doing so, I stumbled on the Sarajevo Bee-Fest: lots of stalls with people selling all kinds of different local honeys, other bee products, and bee-keeping equipment. No sign of worry about colony collapse disorder.
Adding value to agriculture
DEFINITION: Agriculture, value added (% of GDP). Agriculture corresponds to ISIC divisions 1-5 and includes forestry, hunting, and fishing, as well as cultivation of crops and livestock production. Value added is the net output of a sector after adding up all outputs and subtracting intermediate inputs. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated assets or depletion and degradation of natural resources. The origin of value added is determined by the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), revision 3.
Ok, that’s the World Bank definition of agricultural value added. So what country do you think will come top? You can get the answer, and lots of other agricultural data by country, at NationMaster. Or you can click below and see the map. Orange means high value added.