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Baobab to be the next coffee

What’s happening at the NY Times? Following yesterday’s op-ed on “hidden hunger” 1 there’s one today on a plant that’s a neglected but very important source of micronutrients (among other things) in parts of semi-arid Africa — the baobab. The writer — an anthropologist — fears that the recent opening of the European market to baobab fruit pulp products 2 will lead to the clearing of “precious forests or farmland” to establish agribusiness plantations.

Although local people would probably find jobs on such farms, their ability to harvest or purchase the baobab themselves would be limited. They wouldn’t be able to pay as much as London dealers could. This means that some Africans could lose a source of household wealth, an important part of their diet and an essential pharmaceutical resource.

Even the spectre of genetic modification is raised.

These possibilities — not to mention the threat of corruption, poor wages and genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity — are not random predictions. Africa is no stranger to the overexploitation of its natural resources. But the solution isn’t necessarily to cut the baobab off from international markets. Regulations could be put in place to protect the tree, its environment and the people who depend on it — and still allow for profitable production.

The coffee trade is then presented as a model.

It’s clear that many consumers are willing to pay more for fairly traded coffee — which costs enough to provide the growers a decent wage for their labor. This bottom-up pricing should be applied to the baobab market, even if it means European health nuts have to pay a lot for their smoothies.

Well, it’s all a little premature, of course. Baobab is many decades from being in even remotely comparable a situation to coffee. There will not be industrial baobab plantations for many many years, if ever. And as for “genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity,” I for one will not be losing any sleep over that. If I were a baobab entrepreneur I’d concentrate on local and regional markets for now, identify superior genotypes maybe, look into sustainable harvesting practices and experiment with different value-addition strategies. I’d also look at establishing small, village-level nurseries: it’s already been done for fresh leaf production. The European market — and all those health nut hipsters with their smoothies — can wait a while.

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The call of the wild

Not sure how long they’ve been available, but I’ve just learned that the new versions of the Last of the Wild maps are out. The first version is a few years old now.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University have joined together to systematically map and measure the human influence on the Earth’s land surface today. The Last of The Wild, Version Two depicts human influence on terrestrial ecosystems using data sets compiled on or around 2000.

These are Europe’s most untouched areas:
europe

Not much left. There are also global and continental maps of human footprint and human influence index, although I must say I haven’t fully digested the difference between the two. And you can download the data and play around with it yourself, of course. Let the mashing begin!

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CWR heaven

So you’re on holiday at a villa in Western Crete; blue skies, bluer seas, wildflowers, olive groves and fish so fresh it practically flaps its way onto your plate. But it isn’t enough. And before you arrived, your blogging compadre told you that a few kilometres down the coast was a micro-reserve dedicated to the conservation of Phoenix theophrasti, right at the western edge of its distribution.

“Hey,” you announce gaily. “Let’s go see the wild date palms a few kilometres down the coast.”

Jaws drop, sniggers are suppressed, knowing glances exchanged. Agricultural biodiversity has reared its ugly head, on holiday no less. 3

Eventually, one of the company asks the dreaded question.

“Why?”

So you go into blather mode. Crop wild relatives. Narrow genetic resources. Problems of cultivated date palms. (What was the name of that disease that’s killing Deglat Nour?) Breeding cycles. Climate change. Are date seeds recalcitrant? Vital importance for the entire future of the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. Blather, blather, blather.

And they buy it, yes! To humour you, but still. So off you wend along narrow, beautiful mountain roads, detouring for three hours to get a flat tire fixed. And there in the car park of the taverna where you stopped for coffee, locally-grown papaya and raki — at 11.30 in the morning — while the puncture was being mended, is a sign about the micro-reserve for Phoenix theophrasti, which enumerates the threats, outlines the responses and acknowledges the sponsors, but fails to answer the “why?” question.

Refreshed, on you wend, past the monastery of the golden step, through olive groves sheltering biblical flocks of sheep in their shade and down a stony incline. Confusingly, a couple of houses boast tame date palms, and you’re forced to admit that those are not why we came.

Suddenly, there you are. An honest-to-God turquoise lagoon fringed by lunar volcanic rock that has remarkably sharp edges. A sign and, you have to admit, some pretty ragged looking specimens that are clearly very like date palms.

Off you scamper to document the find and alert your colleague. Snap, snap, snap.

Carob trees. Wild thyme alive with bees. Spininess abounds. CWR heaven.

You return to the company, which has also been scampering, documenting, and paddling in the lagoon.

“This is heaven,” says one.

You breathe a quiet sigh of relief.

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Documenting the history of fisheries

  • Human fishing and impacts on near-shore and island marine life — including the catching of shellfish, finfish and other marine mammals — apparently began in many parts in the Middle Stone Age — 300,000 to 30,000 years ago — 10 times earlier than previously believed;
  • Passages of Latin and Greek verse written in 2nd century CE suggest Romans began trawling with nets;
  • In the early to mid 1800s, years of overfishing followed by extreme weather collapsed a European herring fishery. Then, the jellyfish that herring had preyed upon flourished, seriously altering the food web;
  • In the mid 1800s, periwinkle snails and rockweed migrated from England to Nova Scotia on the rocks ships carried as ballast — the tip of an “invasion iceberg” of species brought to North America;
  • In less than 40 years, Philippine seahorses plunged to just 10% of their original abundance, reckoned in part through fishers’ reports of each having caught up to 200 in a night in the early days of that fishery.

Just some of the insights that will be shared by participants in the forthcoming Oceans Past II conference, according to EurekaAlert. It sounds absolutely fascinating:

Using such diverse sources as old ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts, newly translated legal documents and even mounted trophies, Census [Census of Marine Life] researchers are piecing together images — some flickering, others in high definition — of fish of such sizes, abundance and distribution in ages past that they stagger modern imaginations.

It’s all part of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project. One of the regions being studied is the Mediterranean, and the project website has some great historical photographs of fisheries, for example from the Venetian lagoon. The “scientific area” includes an erudite answer to the question “Did the Romans eat fish?” by HMAP leader of the Black Sea project Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen. Here’s a perhaps surprising snippet:

The fish product most likely to be found in the average Roman kitchen or cookshop was garum, a sauce made from fermented fish and similar to the sauce known as umami or nuac, which is very popular throughout East Asia today. Garum was used to give flavour to stews, soups and many other dishes; it could also be eaten as a relish on bread.

The project includes some interesting data visualization tools.

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Featured: hot cows

back40 has hot news on cool cows:

Cows are hot. Their eponymous rumens run at about 104F due to the furious activity of rumen biota. This means that heat is often a worse problem than cold since it takes energy to stay cool as well as warm, yet they need to eat and so refill the rumen to get energy. The hurrier they go the behinder they get. Shade in summer is as important as wind shelter in winter.

Not a lot of people know that.