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Free the grape!

I blogged a few weeks back about the shift in the approach being taken in Europe to protect traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization. Rather that erecting subsidies and tariffs to compete on price, the idea is to move upmarket and sell expensive niche products to rich foreigners. Of course, that requires a quality control and labelling system, such as appellations of origin (aka geographical indications).

Well, there’s a downside to such systems. I was idly going through my feed reader today and I ran across an old post on The Fruit Blog (a great blog which unfortunately seems to have gone dormant of late) which pointed to a 2004 article in the International Herald Tribune about how legislation is being used in Europe to basically outlaw some old American grapevine varieties:

The story has been all but forgotten in France today except among a handful of wine experts and a gaggle of bureaucrats who enforce the law. The French government banned wine made from American grape varieties on the grounds that it tasted like raspberries and was thus offensive to the palate. The European Commission adopted the French rule in 1979, making it illegal to grow these varieties anywhere in the European Union.

The percentage of outlawed American grape varieties is relatively small in France. But the offending vines are also sprinkled widely throughout several East and Central European countries that have recently joined or will soon join the European Union.

“You can’t tell the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians to uproot their vines,” says Pierre Galet, perhaps the world’s leading expert on grape varieties. He believes the ban on American varieties is anachronistic.

Shades of what Jeremy has called Europe’s draconian seed laws. The US, in contrast, is not shy about mixing up the American and European grapevine genepools (I have blogged about this before: funny how much I write about wine).

As I say, the IHT article is a few years old, and things may have changed. Something is afoot in the EU with regards to wine legislation, but I wasn’t able to find any more recent analysis of the specific issue of the old American varieties. If you know the latest Brussels scoop on this, let us know.

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Not so cool cartograms

Worldmapper has a new series of cartograms out, and very depressing they are too. ((Via National Geographic.)) They show the size of territories scaled in proportion to the absolute numbers of deaths from various causes. Look in particular at the nutritional deficiencies map. But for a real shock, check out the specific map for vitamin A deficiency. Remember, this is something that is totally preventable, thanks to agrobiodiversity. No wonder that scientists working in Africa have highlighted the importance of high beta-carotene sweet potato cultivars in the recent global survey of sweet potato research priorities carried out by the International Potato Centre (CIP). ((Via EurekAlert.)) Coincidentally, I also found today a report on an attempt to promote sweet potato (and other root crops) on the ground in Africa, focusing on women and homegardens. ((Via Eldis.)) The researchers say that one of the things that can be useful in encouraging adoption is providing information on nutritional benefits.

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Herbal remedies

ResearchBlogging.orgAromatic agrobiodiversity was in the news and the peer-reviewed literature today. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) got a good write-up in ScienceDaily. It turns out that one of chemicals found in its spiky leaves — carnosic acid — can protect the brain from free radicals, but is only activated by the damage caused by these compounds. Otherwise it just sits there doing nothing, which is what you want in a drug. Anyway, there are lots of different varieties of rosemary, and different levels of carnosic acid among them. There are also wild populations in the Mediterranean, as of other herbs as well, and people who make a living harvesting them from the garrigue. That can sometimes be overdone, resulting in damage to the plants, and to the environment, due to increased soil erosion when it rains. So a study from Spain just published in the journal Catena is welcome. It quantified how much harvesting of various aromatic shrubs (lavender, oregano, sage and santolina) you can do before the soil starts to suffer. The recommendation is to leave 50% of the plant biomass in the field.

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What’s your poison?

One of the more interesting — and controversial — uses of biodiversity, both wild and agricultural, is to cause altered states of consciousness. As luck would have it, there were three things sort of on this topic which caught my eye today.

First, a short article from the New Scientist appeared in my feed reader about how the UN Environment Programme has singled out for conservation a chunk of desert in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The importance of this area comes from the fact that it is the home of the peyote cactus, source of the hallucinogenic alkaloid mescaline, and objective of an annual pilgrimage by the Huichol people.

Then there was a EurekAlert piece about funding for an attempt to breed new varieties of the opium poppy and of cannabis that could be used to produce useful bioproducts, but not illicit drugs. This is apparently all going to take place in an ultra-secure Canadian mine shaft. Maybe they could then store the resulting seed in another famous hole in the ground?

And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a cool interactive map where you can find out about famous British brewers.

Mescaline, dope and beer. In the words of Major T.J. “King” Kong, “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that agrobiodiversity.” Well, he almost said that.