Dr Songpol Somsri from Thailand has done a lot of crossing of wild species of durian to come up with one that doesn’t smell like decomposing cats. There should be more recognition for this sort of achievement: it has a greater potential to add to the sum total of human happiness than any number of Nobel Prizes for economics, say.
Swapping sorghum for tea
Farmers in areas of Uganda are being asked to plant tea instead of sorghum. The government will supply subsidized seedlings and will open a processing factory that will buy the leaves. The main motive is that tea earns double the income of sorghum. That may be, and diversification is a good thing, but I wonder whether the income from tea will buy as much nutrition as the sorghum it replaces.
Enset bags
Via Timbuktu Chronichles comes news that a Ugandan company called African Skin has won the Business in Development Challenge. African Skin makes attractive bags and other accessories from the outer layers of fibre of the enset plant (see also here for the role of enset in food security in Ethiopia), which can be sustainably harvested. “The Business in Development (BiD) Challenge is the first international business plan competition for entrepreneurship and development. The BiD Challenge offers entrepreneurs worldwide the opportunity to develop and execute business plans that improve living standards in developing countries at a profit.”
No longer in the dark about mushrooms
From India to South America. If you want to see how one farm has diversified into mushroom production, our friend Andy Jarvis has posted a set of informative photographs to flickr, the image sharing web site.
Mushrooming success
Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the pace of news. A week ago The Indian Express ran a story about Lal Muni Devi, a poor landless woman who had made a great success of turning wheat waste into mushrooms. Lal Muni had not even heard of mushrooms four years ago. Researchers from the Indian Institute for Agricultural Research turned up and trained 25 women from her village to grow mushrooms, and she was one of the most successful. Reason enough to report. But the reason The Indian Times seems to have published the story now is that Lal Muni Devi featured in a news story from CIMMYT, the International Centre for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, more than a year ago! No matter, it is always good to read about successes in diversifying species to boost incomes.
Photo by Paras Nath from The Indian Express