A nice cup of tea

Photo from Flickr user rprice84. Creative Commons licence.

I can't manage without a cup of tea first thing in the morning. After that I'm set up for the day and turn to decaffeinated coffee, and usually Fairtrade if I can find it. I've noticed in England a much larger range is now available, though less so with tea it seems.

Tea was first planted in Malawi in 1878 and commercial production started in 1880, so Malawi was something of a pioneer for Africa, but times have changed and growers are not managing to realise the prices that the Kenyan market does.

There are various initiatives which are hoping to reverse this trend:

• Development of identifiable brands associated with Malawi.
• Processing of green tea for the East Asian market.
• Charity auctions where the proceeds are donated to AIDS orphans and other good causes.
• Production of "sustainable" teas such as Malawi Garden Tea whose production directly supports the growers, their families, and the local community of the Kawalazi tea plantation in Malawi.
• Tourism such as Traidcraft's Meet the People Tours and tea estates, such as Satemwa and Lujeri Lodge, which provide guesthouses for hire.

Something new (to me anyway) I noticed on the Satema site - white tea. Anyone for a cuppa?

Main source: Inter Press Service

Yes we have more bananas

The last post and a follow up article from the Economist sent to me by Janeway has brought me back to my childhood in Africa.

The title of this post is taken from a song my father used to sing, completely out of tune as always. When we lived in Malawi he translated it, very roughly, into Nyanja. Purely from memory it went something like this (and I could be horribly wrong):

Inde palibe ntochi
Palibe ntochi lero

I remember too a conversation discussing whether all fruits have seeds. I racked my brains and finally said that bananas don't have seeds. But of course they do in the wild.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The seeds are hard and rather large. The first edible varieties probably arose by random mutation and it's thought they may have been cultivated for as long as 10,000 years

From the Economist article (no link as it is subscription only)

Cultivated bananas, like their cousins, the tropical staples cassava and taro, have a characteristic that makes them ideal food. They have no seeds. Unfortunately, the same characteristic means that it is fiendishly difficult to breed better bananas. This is an important task, as bananas are threatened by new kinds of pests and diseases. Furthermore, because bananas are clones, whole plantations could be devastated by such an attack.

The United Nations estimates that bananas are the fourth most important crop in the world, after wheat, rice and maize.

Leuven, as mentioned in my previous post, is the "banana capital" of the world. It houses 1,175 different varieties grown as tiny plants in test tubes. They have recently developed a less labour intensive method of storage, ways of deep-freezing banana samples. They have been able to show that, after five years in liquid nitrogen, banana cell suspensions can be recovered and turned into growing plants. And it is a second copy of all these samples that has been transported to Montpellier in the south of France.

Back up bananas

I was extremely pleased to see last night that the BBC caught up with me on the subject of the Svalbard seed vault :) Tuesday 26 February was the day of the official opening.

Svalbard is only part of the story though because the storage conditions don't suit all plants, only those which have seeds that can be dried and stored. Bananas don't.

Photo by L. Guarino via Bioversity. Creative Commons licence.

Bananas and plantains cannot be dried and stored but they do need cold ( -196C) temperatures. The Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Montpellier in the south of France has taken delivery of a safety backup of samples from Leuven in Belgium, in the same way that Svalbard has taken delivery of seeds.

If anything should happen to the original samples there is now a duplicate set available. It may seem unlikely but a typhoon damaged the Philippine rice gene bank, and looters destroyed wheat and lentil gene banks at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. It is essential to preserve these collections of biodiversity.

Other crops that are best preserved by tissue culture or in field gene banks are coconut, cassava, yam, potato, sweet potato and taro.

For the full story see Bioversity.

Update: posts also from DianeCA of Metamorphoses and RennyBA has loads of pictures on his Terella - he has been to Svalbard!

Agricultural research

SARID = Sustainable Agriculture Research for International Development.

Three quarters of the poorest people in developing countries depend on agriculture. A major initiative to tackle some of the most damaging pests, diseases and environmental conditions which can devastate their crops was launched today by SARID, with £7 million being shared between projects.

Arsenic in rice

Photo by Flickr user Praziquantel. Creative Commons licence.

Arsenic contamination is a major problem in some countries, the result of contaminated groundwater, pollution from mining, and the use of municipal solid waste as fertilizer. the research teams will look at types of rice that take up less of the contamination. This work will be carried out in India, Bangladesh, China and Aberdeen in Scotland

Purging plantain pests

Photo from SARID.

Plantain, or cooking bananas, make up 30% of the daily calories of many of Africa's poorest people, but up to half the crop is lost a a result of worms feeding on the roots of the plants. Because the plants cannot be bred - they are sterile - normal breeding programmes can't be used to produce resistant strains. Researchers in Uganda and the UK (Leeds) will be looking at this problem.

Other research projects

In total there will be 12 different projects over the next four years, covering crops such as sweet potatoes, coconuts, millet and maize, kale and cabbage. More detail is available in a pdf file.

It is very likely that at least some of the research will be looking at genetic modification. This was once thought to be a wonderful way to alleviate poverty and hunger but more recently there has been huge controversy over its safety and impact.

Two very conflicting reports have recently been published, one from the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), and the other from Friends of the Earth International. While biotechnology may not be the "magic bullet" it once was expected to be, it may well have a role to play. It is important though that it shouldn't be developed without consideration of the environment in which it will be used.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Entrance to the seed vault.

Photo from the Global Crop Diversity Trust via IRIN

Today the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture shipped 7,000 seed samples from 36 different African countries to Oslo. On 26 February 2008 these seeds will be among the first to be put into the specially prepared vault deep in the permafrost near the village of Longyearbyen.

The seeds will be stored at –18 degrees Celsius in specially designed, five-ply aluminium foil packages inside sealed boxes stored on high shelves inside the vault. The low temperature and limited access to oxygen will ensure low metabolic activity and delay aging.

If there should be a disaster in the world affecting agriculture or the gene bank, the seeds will be there to provide some food security. They hope to have 4.5 million seed samples.

The collection and maintenance of the seeds is co-ordinated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has responsibility of ensuring the "conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity". The Norwegian government has built the vault at a cost of $9m (£4.5m), for the benefit of mankind.

Clearly RennyBA and TorAa aren't the only wonderful Norwegians in the world :)

Fruits of Africa

The National Academies (in America) yesterday published a report on the native fruits of Africa. It is the third in a series, the previous ones having looked at native grains and vegetables.

Their suggestion is that tropical fruit production in Africa has been dominated for centuries by species imported from Asia and the Americas. Bananas and pineapples are examples. These fruits were already improved by selection and breeding programmes over the years and gradually displaced native fruits.

As a result native species have been neglected and forgotten, but if they received the attention of horticulturalists, they could contribute both to nutrition and the economy. Some are already cultivated while others are wild. They include fruits with intriguing names such as chocolate berries and gingerbread plums.

Photo by Flickr user ElRabbit. Creative Commons Licence. 

Baobab fruit pulp can dried into a nutritious powder high in protein, vitamins, and minerals and used in drinks, porridge. It can be dried in flat pancakes and last for months or years. The leaves of the tree can be eaten too.

Photo by Flickr user Sanctu. Creative Commons Licence.

Ebony, above, has bright red fruits which are sweet and juicy and not unlike persimmons which are from the same family. Some varieties have edible seeds too.

Photo by B.navez. Wikimedia Commons.

Tamarind grows wild in Sudan. It was introduced to India so long ago that it is often thought to be native to there. It moved from India to Asia and gained the name tamarind from the Arabic "tamar hindi" meaning Indian date.

It is a fascinating report, and you can find the full 380 pages online.

Tropical Legumes Project

Legumes are the third largest family of plants, and many species among them are very nutritious and/or improve the quality of soil. However they haven’t so far received a great deal of attention to increase yields and help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Soybeans

ICRISTAT, the International Crops Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics are conducting a research and development project to improve the productivity of legumes. This will be funded for three years by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will act in partnership with the Program for African Seed Systems to ensure the availability of the seeds to African farmers.

Peanuts

Legumes are rich in protein and minerals and sometimes referred to as "poor man’s meat". They hold great promise for fighting hunger, increasing income and improving soil fertility.

Black eyed beans

The research is being carried out in 14 different countries in Africa, as well as in Asia.