Posts

Posted on

Sorghum endures

How much crop genetic diversity have we lost? At one level, the question is easy to answer: three quarters over the last century. That’s certainly the number that’s most often quoted.

But that doesn’t make it right. In particular, I have it on very good authority that the figure may in fact be traceable back — a la Chinese whispers — to a statement in Fowler & Mooney’s 1990 book Shattering: “As the mid-1970s were reached, three-quarters of Europe’s traditional vegetable seed stood on the verge of extinction.”

Not quite the same thing. Anyway, be that as it may, the existence of a dominant narrative hasn’t stopped people going out into the field and — the horror! — actually collecting data.

Continue reading “Sorghum endures”

Posted on

Give ’em a phone

Why don’t coffee growers get more for their beans when world prices are higher? First off, I had to admit, I didn’t know that they didn’t. But apparently even against a background of rapidly rising prices, growers do not get much more. A new study of coffee growers in Uganda explains that rising prices brings out so-called “ddebe boys”, part-time coffee traders who “insert themselves between farmers and larger permanent traders and mills”. The ddebe is a 20 kg tin that they use to purchase coffee from farmers who are ignorant of the true market prices. The obvious solution is to give farmers access to current market information.

Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill, who conducted this study say they don’t know whether this would solve the problem, but that it deserves to be looked at. I agree. There are already NGOs working with Ugandan farmers via mobile phones, and we know that phones make markets more efficient, so I hope someone gets going on this soon. As for the ddebe boys, I expect they too will find a way to make a living. Maybe by sending SMS spam?

Posted on

Smell this

Will perfume smell more delicious if the labdanum in it has been scraped off the beards of Cretan goats?

Ah, how I love to meander the byways of economic biology. Who knew that Cretan rock roses (Cistus creticus) produce a resin called labdanum? That labdanum, among many other uses, is a base note in perfume not unlike the fabled ambergris? Or that the best quality labdanum is gathered adventitiously, as it were, by goats grazing on Cretan herbage (rather like that civet-cat coffee)?

I didn’t either. But now you can too, thanks to the Human Flower Project.

Posted on

Energy special

Hot on the heels of our concerns about carbon sequestration, biofuels, biochar, EGS and all that malarkey,  The Economist has a special issue this week on  Alternative Energy. ((Not sure how much of it is available to non-subscribers; if that link doesn’t work, please let me know.)) And what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Let a thousand flowers bloom.