Climate change causes blueberry war.
Historical food information
Weird how just a couple of days after I blogged about current African foodways, The Lubin Files at FAO points me to a wonderful website about the past eating habits of various East African countries. This was put together by Verena Raschke, who at the time was completing a PhD jointly at University of Vienna (Austria) and Monash University (Australia).
[Her] project is based on a precious and unique collection of literature and data from East Africa from the 1930s to the 1960s.
…
These unpublished data have been stored at the Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food Location Karlsruhe (Germany) for the last 30 years, after the Max Planck Nutrition Research Unit in Tanzania (East Africa) was shut down in the late1970s.
The material is called the Oltersdorf Collection, and it is a veritable treasure trove of historical information on crops, food and nutrition.
IPM worth a fortune in New Zealand vineyards
NZ grape growers discover value of local biodiversity: NZ$1000 per ha per year.
Agrobiodiversity around the home
British homegardens to be surveyed.
Cheese and olives
A column in the current issue of The Economist uses the example of Gruyère and Emmental cheeses in Switzerland to make the case that, if Europe wants to protect its traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization, moving upmarket and selling expensive niche products to rich foreigners may be a better bet than “to deploy subsidies and tariffs to compete artificially on price.” Which is mostly what’s happening now.
[EU farm Commissioner] Mariann Fischer Boel … has urged food producers to focus on quality, heritage and new markets. This summer, she told exporters that import tariffs will move in only one direction in the coming years: “downwardsâ€.
Of course, that will require marketing savvy. It will also require a robust quality-monitoring and labelling systems. Because, as a New Yorker piece on the “slippery business” of trading in fake Italian extra virgin olive oil entertainingly demonstrates this week, there are plenty of wise guys around ready to exploit loopholes and weaknesses.
Later: Cheese, olives, and wine!