Category: Markets

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The diverse crops of Kenya

I’ll be away for about a week so blogging might be a bit light, but I couldn’t resist mentioning the following four stories that were in the print edition of the Daily Nation this morning before leaving:

  1. A new climbing bean variety developed by the University of Nairobi and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has been released and will be ready for commercial production by June.
  2. Coconut vendors in Mombasa are set to have access to a new technology (developed by FAO in collaboration with the Intermediate Technology Development Institute) for keeping coconut juice fresh for up to 3 weeks.
  3. The vice-chairman of the Rift Valley branch of the Kenya Horticultural Society asked local universities to start breeding new flower varieties rather than using material from the Netherlands and Israel.
  4. A group of Nyeri farmers have started selling their coffee directly to international dealers rather than through the traditional central auction system.

I thought the range of these articles really gave an good impression of the great variety of Kenyan agriculture and agricultural research.

See you again soon…

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Trade information by mobile

Between the Common Catalogue on one side and regulations on the entry of new agricultural products on the other, it does sometimes seem like the EU just doesn’t want farmers to grow diverse crops, either within its borders or indeed anywhere else on Earth. Anyway, on the latter issue, maybe one of the answers is for developing world farmers to trade more among themselves. One of the bottlenecks to that, of course, is the availability of price and other information. So it was really interesting to read in The Economist about tradenet, an internet application developed by a software company out of Ghana that enables users to exchange market information, including by SMS text messages. Mobile telephony is of course expanding at tremendous speed in Africa. Tradenet is basically a sort of eBay for agricultural products, where you can put in your bid by cell phone. And more. Listen to this: “we will incorporate the ability to generate digital maps of your country with overlays of pricing for commodities, as well as include key markets in neighboring countries, where you can zoom or pan around vector maps.” Cool or what?

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Crops in the news

I’m not sure what to make of newspaper articles describing how to grow and process staple crops. On the one hand, it is nice to see the mainstream media take on agricultural subjects. On the other, it is sometimes difficult to see who exactly is meant to benefit from articles such as this on cassava from the St Kitts & Nevis and this on sweet potato from Zambia. Any thoughts?