While browsing the iafrica.com website after reading its features on the potato, I ran across an article about tea-tasting at the Mont Rochelle Hotel in Franschhoek, not far from Cape Town. Which sounds wonderful. But a poignant complement to it was provided by a post I found a little bit later on a blog from the Botswanan village of Nata, which has a line about how tea and bread are served at funerals there. Anyway, Nata Village Blog seems like it’s definitely worth following. Franschhoek and Nata are about 1,600 km apart, as the crow flies.
Alfred H. Peet dies
The “grandfather of specialty coffee” goes to the big caffè in the sky.
Down on the levee
A riverine trifecta today, describing threats to the biodiversity — including agrobiodiversity — associated with major rivers around the world…
From Italy, news that students and teachers from the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Pollenzo (founded in 2004 by Slow Food guru Carlo Petrini) — over 150 of them — Â will travel down the Po River watershed by bicycle and boat in September and October. They’ll be giving the river and its valley a source-to-delta checkup, they say, diagnosing their ills but also identifying their abiding strengths — ecological, cultural and, presumably, agricultural.
Further east, Hubert von Goisern, an Austrian musician, has done something similar — but in his own way — for the Danube. He’s spent the summer giving a series of concerts down the river for a WWF campaign to raise awareness of the damage that planned development projects will do to the habitat of the Danube sturgeon. Plans to straighten and deepen the course of the river to facilitate shipping are expected to affect a thousand-kilometer stretch, destroying a unique natural and cultural heritage.
And further east still, Nguyen Huu Chgiem, the son of a Mekong delta rice farmer, reflects on how climate change, deforestation and saltwater intrusion are affecting Vietnam’s “rice basket.” And what he can do about it now that he’s a professor of environment and natural resources management.
Lose the farmers, lose the environment
Further to Luigi’s thoughtful article on how hard farming is becoming, and how the skills needed to farm effectively are being lost as young people abandon rural life for the city, news that a farming environment often considered the eighth wonder of the world is under threat. The Banaue Rice Terraces of Luzon in the Philippines are beyond words. But they are apparently being destroyed by giant earthworms and edible snails, among other pests. But honestly, if the people are introducing snails to supplement their diet, how sustainable can the terraces possibly be? Only human labour can sustain such artifice, and only human need can command and coordinate that much labour. The President of the Philippine Senate has called for a “comprehensive study”. But what is it likely to recommend? That maintaining the terraces be a government-funded job to keep a tourist attraction in a state that will attract tourists, and their cash? Or can the communities that have inherited the Banaue terraces somehow be shown ways in which they can benefit directly from the tourist cash?
Photo from Wayfaring Travel Guide (because Flickr doesn’t work too well here in China.)
Are farmers a dying breed?
I didn’t go looking for this. These three stories came to me independently, from different sources, from different parts of the world, but all within a day or two of each other. And all describing agriculture in crisis.