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One more cup of coffee

For some reason, there’s been a sackful of coffee stories lately. Here’s a quick summary:

“Pistols for two, and coffee for one.”

“[Coffee] is of excellent Use in the time of Pestilence, and contributes greatly to prevent the spreading of Infection.”

“We just had to try at least a cup in every village we stopped at, and as they were small cups, sometimes more than one… The irony is that I am a ‘tea-only girl’.”

“Yes, Starbucks has announced it’s taking up shop in Bogota, Colombia. It says it wants to celebrate Colombian coffee.”

“Here, we do not work hard for survival, but we work hard to live a better life; that is what I’ve learned from working on this plantation.”

“In order to create these pre-breeding populations with enough genetic diversity for these economically important traits, WCR 1 will utilize genetic material from the current germplasm collections as well as new material coming from wild populations from the WCR GERMPLASM Project.”

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Looking for Mr Soybean

I think the following Twitter exchange is pretty self-explanatory.

https://twitter.com/soyshadow/statuses/371571357550518272

But let me break it down anyway, as I have a feeling you may not be able to see the whole conversation without the sort of extra clicking that we’re always told users don’t like to do. Farmer finds 5-seed soybean pod, which is kinda unusual, apparently. Seed company makes much of it on both Twitter and Facebook. Soybean breeder says: that’s nothing, some wild species have more than 8 seeds per pod! Luigi tries to figure out which ones by trawling GRIN, to no avail. Breeder comes up with factsheet on Glycine tabacina, which is interesting enough but not really the point. Another fine day in Genebank Database Hell.

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The further deconstruction of Indian onion prices

A quick follow-up to our post a couple of days back on the price of onions in India. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal, no less, weighed in on the subject, with a reference to a report commissioned by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to get to the bottom of…

…volatility of onion prices and its relationship with distribution in the what the CCI described as a “loose and casual market.”

According to one of the authors, quoted by the WSJ:

There is almost an oligopoly kind of situation and until there are multiple players, the price will be dictated by a few traders.

So it’s all down to those pesky middlemen, it seems. Farmers have no chance:

Farmers generally take reference of the local markets’ rates, while traders compare rates of all markets, including major distant and export markets and then decide where to send their produce

Ah, but wait. There’s also news of a World Bank pilot project to crowdsource price data on agricultural commodities which may solve that little problem. Here’s the onion data from last year. 2 I’m not sure whether in due course we’ll also have this year’s, and thus be able to see that 200% year-on-year increase in July mentioned by the WSJ.

indian onions

I guess the real challenge is to get these numbers out in real time, and in a way that farmers can make use of. There’s clearly a way to go:

What did we learn? The results from the pilot tell us that, yes, the crowd can collect reliable and timely prices – but you need to provide incentives and implement good verification and validation processes. The resulting data are comparable over time and space, and timeliness is pretty good — the time lag is only about a month. And, importantly, the resulting data are open to all users.

A good start, no doubt, but I’m not sure that a month after the event is going to be of much use to farmers. Other similar efforts are underway, though, so maybe one of these “thousand points of light” will emerge as a bit brighter than the others. After all, if weather, why not prices?

Why is this important for agricultural biodiversity? Well, for a start, markets have been touted as the saviours of neglected and underutilized crops, and maybe even landraces of the more successful and overused sort. Wouldn’t do if they were “loose and casual”, now would it?

Meanwhile, can we have the same for fish?

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Brainfood: Touristic islands, Pearl millet diversity, Barley diversity, Maize diversity, Weird chickpea, Sweet potato diversity, Pawpaw diversity, Grewia domestication, Agrobiodiversity is the key, Sunflower relative dynamics

Sorry about the Brainfood hiatus lately. Back now, and with a vengeance.

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Knowing your (Indian) onions

I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the current precarious state of the Indian economy, but there are quite a few stories doing the rounds on the high prices of agricultural commodities in that country. Just today there were pieces on onions and on guar, which is the legume Cyamopsis tetragonoloba, whose gum has a role in fracking. But this onions business is nothing new. I am sure I remember similar panics in past years, and not just in 2011, which is the only search peak Google reveals:

trend

Anyway, just for the hell of it, I waded into FAOSTAT’s onion price data for India and a couple of neighbouring countries, and this is what I got:

chart

Some fluctuations, yes, but not much evidence or price spikes, surely. But why all that missing data from India (the red line)? Let the conspiracy theorizing begin!