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Ramie ruminations

Not a day passes that I don’t utter an imprecation — as Julian Simon Barnes did in print a few days back — at agrobiodiversity. Take yesterday. There’s a big meeting going on this week at FAO, and they’ve set up a series of stands in the atrium. Most of them are pretty boring, just piles of publications and the odd poster, but the one put up by the people behind the International Year of Natural Fibres is very nice indeed.

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It has examples of handicrafts and other products made from a whole lot of different fibres, from abaca to muskox. Including ramie. And that’s when I cursed the neverending-ness of biodiversity. For what, pray, is ramie? I know abaca and muskox, but I’d never heard of ramie.

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Well, it turns out to be Boehmeria nivea, a shrub in the nettle family widely cultivated in East Asia since antiquity for its bark, which is used to make fabrics. The IYNF website has a page about it. The Korean national costume (the hanbok) is made of ramie cloth, so we’re not talking about a minor, obscure, criminally underused plant here. Bloody agrobiodiversity indeed. I hate you.

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Amazing potato factoid: they’re high protein

People complain that potatoes are “only” 2% protein. But …

[P]otatoes are so prolific that you still end up with 500-1000kg of protein per year per hectare of potatoes, versus 164-500kg of protein from soybeans, 98-300kg of protein from wheat, and only 33kg protein from milk produced by cows.

Which is why, where the climate is right, potatoes should be a key component of urban agriculture and home gardens. You do have to eat a lot of them, just be sure not to peel them. From Tom Wagner’s blog.

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“Food prices: What goes up must come down”

Oh yeah? I’ve taken our headline directly from Mariann Fischer Boel in full rhetorical flight.

When the price on wheat went up last year, I wondered quite publicly why bread prices skyrocketed when the share of wheat in the cost of producing bread was relatively low. Back then, I was told by industry that the share of agricultural raw material was in fact much higher and that rising energy prices also had an impact. Now with wheat and energy prices having dropped dramatically during the last year, I think it is legitimate to wonder again and ask: why aren’t bread prices following suit?

Good question? Or naive political drivel? You be the judge.