Ah, to get lost on the Tequila Trail!
Protecting British food
If you were intrigued by our recent nibble about Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb receiving Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status by the European Commission, you’ll no doubt be wondering what other examples of British fare share that honour. Well, Paul Mundy just posted a link to a list over at the ELDev Yahoo group. I have only one comment: 10 types of beer and cider seems too few…
Taiwanese agrobiodiversity juxtapositions
Seen in one small convenience store by the roadside in Shanhua: rice and peanut milk, soy and mung bean drink, and almond and fish snack. All mainstream products in fancy packaging. Maybe it’s just that these are unfamiliar combinations, but it seems to me that we’re not nearly as good in the West at mixing and matching our agricultural biodiversity. By the way, there was asparagus juice too. I tried them all, and they were all pretty good.
A coffee journey
Sometimes you come across a story that illustrates so many of the themes of agrobiodiversity conservation that it’s almost too good to be true. I have it on very good authority that the one I’m about to tell you is indeed true, though. The authority is the former head of the genebank at the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza in Costa Rica (CATIE), who is now the head of the genebank at The World Vegetable Centre (AVRDC) in Taiwan.
He told me the story over coffee at the Trees Wind cafe in Tainan City, a short ride from AVRDC’s headquerters. The story is about the coffee he was drinking. I was drinking a very superior arabica from the highlands of Taiwan. But that’s another story, or at least a different aspect of the story. The coffee my host was drinking is called Geisha and it comes from Hacienda Esmeralda in Panama.
He discovered it by chance at Trees Wind when he first moved to AVRDC a year and a half ago and was exploring the surroundings. The name jumped out at him from the menu because he knew it from his days managing the CATIE coffee collection. The owner of Esmeralda had visited the CATIE genebank some years back, looking for coffee germplasm to try out. He’d been growing coffee for decades, having originally got his material from CATIE, but he was now expanding into a higher altitude plantation and wanted new varieties to try. He settled on an accession called Geisha. Nothing to do with Japan, though: this is an Ethiopian landrace, very low yielding, but very high quality; and from the right sort of altitude.
My host didn’t hear much after that about how the material he sent out to Panama fared. Not until, that is, he sampled a cup of the stuff in Tainan some years later. And an expensive cup it is too: 225g of beans will set you back TWD 1800 (USD 56). Coffee is now also grown in Taiwan, along with tea. The stuff I had was great, and about a third of the price of Geisha from Panama, though on a par with interesting brands from Ecuador, Ethiopia and Indonesia.
So, material collected in Ethiopia probably back in the 70s by an international FAO mission, conserved at a regional research institute in Costa Rica, grown in Panama, marketed around the world, and finally sipped in Taiwan by people whose stimulant of choice was quite different until fairly recently, in competition with material from a dozen other countries on three continents. Quite a journey. Quite a lesson in agrobiodiversity interdependence, conservation and use.
Where the (European) buffalo roam
Again from Michael Kubisch.
The European bison or wisent, like its North American counterpart, has faced near extinction during its recent history. Both species have been brought back from the brink starting with relatively small populations — in the case of the European bison perhaps with fewer than 50 individuals. The wisent population now numbers somewhere over 3000, but these animals suffer from low genetic diversity and are furthermore separated into a relatively large number of often very small and isolated herds. This is problematic because it is thought that the survival of a species depends on a minimum number of breeding individuals, although there isn’t necessarily much agreement on what that number needs to be.
There is consensus, however, that the fractured nature of the European bison population is unlikely to guarantee its long-term survival. What is needed is a larger breeding population containing perhaps as many as a thousand individuals. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary for these animals to belong to a single contiguous population, as long as smaller populations exist on stretches of connected land that enable them to come into contact with each other. But even that requires suitable land and lots of it — not an easy quest on a crowded continent.
But there is hope. In a recent study described in the journal Conservation Biology, a multinational group of researchers has determined that the Carpathian Mountains could provide a possible habitat for a wisent metapopulation. This area already contains a number of smaller herds, has the type of vegetation wisent seem to like and (in part thanks to a decrease in human population pressures), and consists of relatively large tracts of suitable land. Implementing this idea would obviously require both existing herds to be enlarged and new ones to be established. Whether the means can be found to accomplish this is hard to predict, but there is no doubt that it would constitute a significant step towards preserving one of Europe’s most magnificent herbivores.