Baobab to be the next coffee

What’s happening at the NY Times? Following yesterday’s op-ed on “hidden hunger” ((Which, however, banged the drum for fortification as a remedy, and didn’t mention the agrobiodiversity route at all.)) there’s one today on a plant that’s a neglected but very important source of micronutrients (among other things) in parts of semi-arid Africa — the baobab. The writer — an anthropologist — fears that the recent opening of the European market to baobab fruit pulp products ((We mentioned this here a couple of times, but alas the key links are broken. Try this.)) will lead to the clearing of “precious forests or farmland” to establish agribusiness plantations.

Although local people would probably find jobs on such farms, their ability to harvest or purchase the baobab themselves would be limited. They wouldn’t be able to pay as much as London dealers could. This means that some Africans could lose a source of household wealth, an important part of their diet and an essential pharmaceutical resource.

Even the spectre of genetic modification is raised.

These possibilities — not to mention the threat of corruption, poor wages and genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity — are not random predictions. Africa is no stranger to the overexploitation of its natural resources. But the solution isn’t necessarily to cut the baobab off from international markets. Regulations could be put in place to protect the tree, its environment and the people who depend on it — and still allow for profitable production.

The coffee trade is then presented as a model.

It’s clear that many consumers are willing to pay more for fairly traded coffee — which costs enough to provide the growers a decent wage for their labor. This bottom-up pricing should be applied to the baobab market, even if it means European health nuts have to pay a lot for their smoothies.

Well, it’s all a little premature, of course. Baobab is many decades from being in even remotely comparable a situation to coffee. There will not be industrial baobab plantations for many many years, if ever. And as for “genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity,” I for one will not be losing any sleep over that. If I were a baobab entrepreneur I’d concentrate on local and regional markets for now, identify superior genotypes maybe, look into sustainable harvesting practices and experiment with different value-addition strategies. I’d also look at establishing small, village-level nurseries: it’s already been done for fresh leaf production. The European market — and all those health nut hipsters with their smoothies — can wait a while.

Nibbles: Prickly pear, Corridors, Nutrition, Backyard chickens, SW agriculture, Non-wood forest products, Mexican ungulates, Chinese sheep

The glut of bugs in your gut

A long article on The Why Files discusses changing attitudes to the human gut flora:

These critters, mainly bacteria, vastly outnumber the cells in our bodies, and we are utterly dependent on them. Bacteria make vitamin K, essential for clotting blood. As they do in cows, bacteria play an essential role converting our food into usable chemicals. And bacteria form a complex barrier against invading pathogenic microbes.

The realization of which has led to an explosion of proper scientific work on probiotics ((“Live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host,” according to the WHO.)), formerly confined to the lunatic fringe.

A springboard for the growing interest, Huffnagle ((Gary Huffnagle, professor of internal medicine and microbiology at the University of Michigan Health System.)) says, was a discovery by Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University, who found that bacteria “can talk to the epithelial cells that line the GI tract, which can turn on different genes depending on who is living nearby.”

What’s the connection to agrobiodiversity? More from the article in The Why Files:

Probiotics can be taken in supplement pills, or in many cultured products, such as yogurt, cottage cheese, tempeh and kefir. It’s not clear which mechanism is better, says Sanders ((Mary Ellen Sanders, executive director of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics.)), who consults to the dairy industry on microbiology. “Often probiotics are incorporated into the production of a food product, but we don’t really have a good sense of how important that might be. During the fermentation of milk into a dairy product, they may … produce organic acids or peptides that contribute to the health effects of a probiotic yogurt, but unfortunately there is no good research to sort out the benefits of a fermented dairy product versus a dry supplement.”

So microbial agrobiodiversity doesn’t just result in a huge range of delicious products with strong niche market potential. It’s also good for you.

Coffee wild relative voted among top 10 new species

Here’s a cool idea. Apparently the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of taxonomists get together regularly and pick the top 10 new species described in the previous year. They’ve just announced the 2008 picks, and they include a crop wild relative. It’s Coffea charrieriana, a caffeine-free coffee from Cameroon. It was named after “Professor A. Charrier, who managed coffee breeding research and collecting missions at IRD during the last 30 years of the 20th century.” And with whom I had the privilege to work some years back in the early days of the African Coffee Research Network. Congratulations to all concerned.