One woman’s efforts to keep tapa culture going strong in Fiji.
Spud exhibits
There’s a Potato Museum, apparently. Pass the chips.
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.
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.
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!
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.