Category: Tourism

Posted on

A famous Italian lentil

I spent the weekend in the Abruzzo region of Italy, which is kind of in the middle of the peninsula, both north-south and east-west. L’Aquila, the seat of the provincial government, is a couple of hours’ drive east of Rome. One of the places we visited was Santo Stefano di Sessanio, which is actually in the Gran Sasso National Park. It’s a pleasant enough medieval village, very well restored, though it has a whiff of Disneyland about it these days, especially in the summer.

Anyway, one of the many interesting things about this place is that it is famous for a particular kind of lentil — very small, tasty and apparently not needing to be soaked before cooking. And expensive. I don’t think the Lenticchia di Santo Stefano (photo below) has been protected like France’s Puy lentil, though.

dscf4746.JPG

Incidentally, I came across that last link purely by coincidence today. I was going to talk about the Santo Stefano lentil anyway, but then a Google alert sent me to a posting in the Cookthink blog which mentions an article in The New Yorker about the place where I work, and refers back to the earlier piece about lentils.

Posted on

What do you know about biodiversity?

That it has absolutely nothing to do with agriculture! That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from a report on the CABI blog about a study in the journal Biological Conservation. It reports a survey of “the general public” in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, which tried to discover what they knew about biodiversity. (I’ve pinched my headline direct from them.) You might think the Cairngorms are not a very agricultural place, but you would be wrong. There’s a great deal of farming up there, to say nothing of timber industries. And some of the conservation efforts seek to duplicate farming practices that have fallen by the wayside. But to hear CABI tell it, even though the survey included foresters and “farmer students” there seemed to be almost no understanding of how agricultural practices are part and parcel of landscapes and their ecology. Bah!

Posted on

Cacao and conservation

A whole issue of the journal Biodiversity and Conservation looks at how cocoa production landscapes can contribute to biodiversity conservation. There are several papers on specific case studies and also an overview. Most of the discussion is — predictably — about what cacao cultivation can do for biodiversity, but, what about the other way around? The overview does suggest that

it is important to understand trade-offs between productivity and conservation and the economic costs of conservation friendly practices to land users so that more effective policies can be designed… Quantifying the benefits (both short and long-term) of biodiversity within agroforestry landscapes to farm productivity, for example via pest and disease control … requires attention.

What are these biodiversity-friendly practices? Here’s a few ideas, again from the overview:

  • eco-friendly certification
  • research and extension to increase productivity while maintaining diverse tree canopies
  • development of markets for non-cocoa products
  • payment for environmental services

As far as certification is concerned, the Fair Tracing Project may suggest solutions:

The Fair Tracing project believes that attaching tracing technology to Fair Trade products sourced in developing countries will enhance the value of such goods to consumers in the developed world seeking to make ethical purchasing choices.

I’ve just come across this project, and I don’t know much about it. A piece on its web site — basically a blog — about the ICT being used to trace fair trade coffee in Haiti did point me to a rather interesting example of a corporation trying to bridge the digital divide.

Posted on

Breadfruit overlooked

USAToday has done a nice write-up of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii, but, unaccountably, this does not even mention the work of the Breadfruit Institute, which is a department of the NTBG. I blogged about the Institute and Diane Ragone’s pioneering efforts in breadfruit conservation not too long ago. They really should get more exposure. But so should other NTBG work on cultivated plants, such as the restoration of the taro terraces at Limahuli, which are now used to grow various varieties of a number of traditional Hawaiian crops. There’s a photo of the terraces in the USAToday piece, but the text is entirely about wild plants. Important stuff, but why leave out the amazing work going on in agricultural biodiversity?

Posted on

Kutch’s wild ass and Important Plant Areas

I blogged about some recent additions to the list of World Heritage Sites a couple of days back, and now I’ve come across a potential new candidate, which should get in on the strength of its name alone: the Wild Ass Sanctuary in the Rann of Kutch. The wild ass in question is Equus hemionus khur, the Indian wild ass, a subspecies of the onager, the Asiatic wild ass. The khur’s habitat does sound fascinating:

The Rann, the last habitat of the wild ass (Equus hemionus khur) covering an area of 4954 sq. km is one of the most remarkable and unique landscapes of its kind in the world, which is considered as a transitional area between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. During the monsoons, while the entire area gets inundated, as many as 74 elevated plateaus stand out in the area. The sanctuary also houses 253 flowering plant species, 93 species of invertebrates and 33 species of mammals including the Khur sub-species of wild ass.

It would be great to have a protected area which is so strongly focused on the conservation of a wild relative of a domesticated animal. Wish there were more of them on the crop wild relative side. We’ve just heard that the international network of protected areas needs to do a better job of covering crop centres of origin and diversity. Now, Britain is hardly a centre of agrobiodiversity, but it does have a few crop wild relatives, so I wonder whether the British boffins who wrote the WWF report on protected areas and crop wild relatives had any input in selecting the just-announced Important Plant Areas (IPA) of the UK. I expect they tried their best, and the selection criteria do mention crop wild relatives, but it seems as if they were pretty much an afterthought:

The IPA project was conceived in Europe in response to the increasing rate of loss of the irreplaceable wealth of Europe’s wild flowers and habitats through rapid economic development, urbanisation, and habitat destruction. The IPA programme is a means of identifying and protecting the most important sites for wild plant and habitats in Europe. In addition to the protection this will offer to threatened habitats and species (higher, lower plants and fungi), IPAs will also offer protection to a wide range of species including medicinal plants, relatives of crop plants, veteran trees and many common but declining species.