Moringa farmers in Tamil Nadu sitting on a goldmine, waiting for a quantum leap
PKM1, a variety of Moringa oleifera, has created a global impact, especially in countries such as Senegal, Rwanda and Madagascar in the African continent. Leaves and flowers of this tree provide macronutrients and micronutrients that are believed to combat malnutrition among children in these countries.
But, Tamil Nadu farmers are yet to capitalise on this lucrative business unfolding in the international market, say experts. Before the arrival of PKM1, there were about six native varieties of moringa (murungai). All these varieties were perennial crops, with trees surviving up to 30 years. These varieties were not commercially viable and were propagated by stem cutting.
Horticulture College and Research Institute at Periyakulam in Dindigul district has been given a mandate to develop high-yielding varieties of vegetables, including moringa. In the late 1980s, the PKM1 variety was introduced by the institute. Its Dean J. Rajangam says germplasm study from the existing varieties of moringa helped in the birth of PKM1 variety. Now, it has been raised on 5,000 acres in Dindigul region, says Deputy Director of Horticulture B. Gayathri.
The PKM1 variety, propagated through seeds, is an annual crop that gives a yield of 20 tonnes per acre in a year and has been well-accepted by farmers. S. Subbian of K. Pudukottai near Reddiyarchathiram says compared to the native varieties, this variety within begins to give yield within six months and regular pruning helps in sustaining the yield for three years after which the yield declines. With care, some of the trees give a yield of 37 kg of drumsticks. Unlike the native breed, PKM1 grows only to a height of six feet, thus it is easier for plucking. It helps the trees from vagaries of nature. since moringa is a fragile tree, the native varieties grow to a great height and they are easily destroyed in gale and heavy rains.
Though technology has given the farmers this high yielding variety, no steps have been taken to provide value addition or to create a Farmer Producer Organisation in this region. 'There is no government cold storage facility in this region. If we had one, we could keep our produce when the market is dull and sell it when the prices are high,' says Mr. Subbian.
Besides, there are no solar dryers too. If the self-help groups had them, the nutrient-rich leaves could be dried and powdered. No standard procedures for production and pruning of the trees are also in place.
Moreover, the leaves are merely considered a by-product of moringa cultivation. If the farmers need to get a share of the pie in the international market, then it is time markets are identified and steps initiated to bring together the farmers as a collective so that they can process the leaves and export them on their own.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
a day ago
- Indian Express
Gujarat: Chimpanzee exhibit to open at SoU jungle safari to mark World Rainforest Day
The Statue of Unity Jungle Safari and Zoological Park in Ekta Nagar (formerly Kevadia) in Narmada district is all set to open the chimpanzee exhibit to the public on Sunday — to mark the World Rainforest Day on June 22, said officials familiar with the matter. The exhibit will house a male and two female chimpanzees, who had been in quarantine, following their arrival in India from Capital Zoo Wildlife Park in Abu Dhabi (UAE) in February this year. Officials said that a special enclosure for chimpanzees has been created in the Ekta Nagar to replicate their natural tropical habitat of the African forests. According to officials, the three chimpanzees had been quarantined and kept away from immediate public display to help them acclimate to the Indian climate but surroundings were created to allow them to 'experience a sense of their own habitat'. Officials added that the three chimpanzees had 'adapted very well and were at ease' in their new home, based on which the Statue of Unity authorities decided to bring them out for the public display area in the special enclosure created for chimpanzees.
Time of India
2 days ago
- Time of India
Chad hopes 'green charcoal' can save vanishing forests
This is an AI-generated image, used for representational purposes only. N'DJAMENA: As they zigzagged from one machine to another in the searing African sun, the workers were covered in black soot. But the charcoal they were making is known as "green", and backers hope it can save impoverished Chad from rampant deforestation. Chad, a vast, landlocked country of 19 million people perched at the crossroads of north and central Africa, is steadily turning to desert. It has lost more than 90 per cent of its forest cover since the 1970s, hit by climate change and overexploitation of trees for household uses such as cooking, officials say. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Scam Exposed: What They Won't Tell You about zero trust! Expertinspector Click Here Undo " Green charcoal " aims to protect what forest is left. Made from discarded plant waste such as millet and sesame stalks or palm fronds, it is meant to save trees from being chopped down for cooking. The product "releases less emissions than traditional charcoal, it doesn't blacken your pots, it has high energy content and lasts up to three times longer than ordinary charcoal," said Ousmane Alhadj Oumarou, technical director of the Raikina Association for Socioeconomic Development (Adser). "Using one kilogramme of green charcoal saves six kilogrammes of wood." The group has installed a production facility in Pont Belile, just north of the capital, N'Djamena. There, workers grind up burnt plant waste, then mix it with gum arabic, which helps it ignite, and clay, which makes it burn more slowly. The resulting black nuggets look like ordinary charcoal. Like the traditional kind, it emits CO2 when it burns, but less, said Souleymane Adam Adey, an ecologist at the University of N'Djamena. And "it contributes to fighting deforestation, by ensuring the trees that aren't cut down continue to capture and store carbon," he said. Refugee pressure The conflict in neighbouring Sudan, which is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, is adding to pressure on Chad, which has become home to more than 800,000 Sudanese refugees since 2023 -- double the 400,000 it already hosted. "Desertification has progressed in the regions that have been hosting Sudanese refugees for the past two years," said Adser's director, 45-year-old businessman Ismael Hamid. Adser invested 200 million CFA francs (about $350,000) to launch the project, then won backing from the World Bank, which buys the charcoal for 750 CFA francs per kilogramme. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, distributes the charcoal in refugee camps in eastern Chad. But Hamid said he hoped to expand production and slash prices to 350 to 500 CFA francs per kilo to make "green charcoal" available and affordable nationwide. The plant currently produces seven to nine tonnes per day. "If we want to meet the country's needs, we have to increase our output by at least a factor of 10," said Hamid, calling for subsidies to support the budding sector. Environment Minister Hassan Bakhit Djamous told AFP the government was working on a policy to promote such projects. "We need to bet on green charcoal as an energy source for the future of our country," he said.
NDTV
2 days ago
- NDTV
5 Indie Art Spaces In African Cities Worth Knowing More About
Independent art spaces are collectives of artists (and others) who club together to set up a communal space – often in former industrial sites and more affordable parts of the city – to further their practice. These spaces are DIY art institutions, if you like, that operate largely under the radar. In art world lingo, 'offspaces'. Designed for purpose over profit, they encourage experimental work and creative risk-taking. They also favour art in public space, which provides an intriguing lens on the city. My Africa-wide research took me to five such spaces, each at least 10 years old, so that I could learn their secret sauce of sustainability. I found it's largely about shapeshifting, a capacity for constant reinvention. The key ingredient is artistic thinking, made up of five key principles highlighted in the examples below. Offspaces are found everywhere but have notably grown across Africa over the past couple of decades, along with fast-changing cities and a resurgent art scene. One big picture point is crucial, and that's about urbanisation. Globally, more and more people are moving to cities and most of them are young – by 2050, one in three young people in the world will be of African origin and the continent will be largely urban. There can be a lack of imagination about what all this means and that's where artists come in. They offer new ideas to help build the world we want to live in, rather than reinforce the one we already have. Offspaces in Africa have to navigate prevailing uncertainty, which is a daily reality for most people living in cities. In response, artists band together to build their own pseudo institutions, bit by bit. These self-made pathways offer useful navigational tactics for others – or 'panya routes', as Kenyans call the trails that motorbike taxis invent. The spaces I visited were all moving away from reliance on foreign donor funding (given little or no state support) towards a hybrid model that blends with local philanthropy, collaborative economies and self-generated income schemes. They also want to own their own land and hold assets so that they can think about the future. 1. The GoDown Arts Centre – Nairobi, Kenya The GoDown Arts Centre was established in 2003. Previously a large compound of repurposed warehouses ('godowns') in Nairobi's industrial area, right now it's a construction site as it morphs into an iconic cultural hub. GoDown 2.0 is a multipurpose vision that works at different scales, like a fractal. There will be a large, welcoming facade leading into a semi-public section for music and dance, with artist studios at the heart. Plus galleries, library, museum, auditorium, offices, hotel, a restaurant, conference facilities and parking. Its rebuild is a great example of how artists create public space: in phases. It follows a radical 'design-with-people' approach, starting with years of input from all directions to reconsider the building and its relationship to the city. This ground-up ethos of horizontality, the first key principle, also shapes its signature event, an annual public arts festival called Nai Ni Who? (Who is Nairobi?). Local residents are the curators, and the everyday city is the artwork. Participants are taken around neighbourhoods on foot to experience the good, the bad, and the possibilities. These grounded insights also inform ongoing engagements GoDown has with policymakers about the shape of a future Nairobi. 2. ANO Institute – Accra, Ghana ANO, established in 2002, repurposed a former workshop for car repairs into a gallery, after starting life in a public park. On the other side of the road, opposite the gallery, stood its office, residency space and growing library. Most intriguingly, a striking rectilinear structure was positioned alongside. This Mobile Museum mimics the trading kiosks that line every street. Many are also shapeshifters: kindergarten by day, church by night, for example. ANO's empty museum, collapsible and see-through, went on a countrywide adventure in 2018 and 2019, asking people to imagine its contents, and later revisited with the results. It signalled a larger and ongoing effort, Future Museum, to find a more relevant exhibition form that's alive to the fluid way culture is threaded here into everyday life. ANO demonstrates the second principle of performativity – that is, not only saying things with art but doing things too. More recently, it rebuilt on a new site in central Accra, designed by 87-year-old Ophelia Akiwumi, entirely from raffia palm in a focus on indigenous knowledge systems. 3. Townhouse Gallery – Cairo, Egypt I visited Townhouse just after it reclaimed its inner-city premises following a partial physical collapse. But this turned out to be a false restart. It closed for good not long after, citing a complex brew of factors that ended 21 years of various battles and resurrections. That it survived so long – from 1998 until 2019 – is remarkable for an offspace. Part of the reason was its solidarity networks, including with neighbourhood communities – mostly mechanic shops and other artisanal trades who even helped Townhouse rebuild. In its heyday, Townhouse comprised an art gallery, library, theatre and performance venue, and notably hatched other spaces. The latest rose like a phoenix from its ashes – Access Art Space, which reanimates the same physical space with visual art exhibitions. The legacy of Townhouse is the third principle of elasticity – responding nimbly to constant flux but also being able to refuse impossible conditions with ' the right no ' (a necessary response in certain situations). 4. ZOMA Museum - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia ZOMA Museum has also lived many lives. Starting small, its roots were in a three-day public arts festival called Giziawi #1 (Temporary). It comprised performances and exhibitions across the city but focused on Meskel Square, a key public space. Zoma Contemporary Art Centre grew out of that in 2002, followed in 2019 by Zoma Museum when its co-founders bought a plot of polluted land. Its rehabilitation into an ecological haven has become a case study in sustainable architecture. Zoma is built by local artisans from mud and straw using indigenous technologies going back centuries. Yet its elegant buildings look futuristic. Zoma is all about the fourth principle of convergence – the past, present and future all happening at once. It's also about doing multiple things, like running Zoma School, an inherited kindergarten. The land is part of the curriculum. Just a year after it opened, Zoma spawned yet another life, an offshoot in a newly opened park blending nature with culture and recreation. 5. Nafasi Art Space - Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania Nafasi is Swahili for opportunity or chance, which fittingly describes the workings of Nafasi Art Space, established in 2008 – that is, second chance. This fifth and final principle of artistic thinking means giving materials, people and situations another go. A good example of this is Nafasi's new art school, built using repurposed shipping containers, like the rest of its premises – artist studios, a spacious gallery and performance arena. In the 2022 academy cohort, a general practice lawyer and an accountant were learning alongside artists, with a biologist at the helm. Nafasi Art Academy cites the city's biggest local market, Kariakoo, as design reference, particularly its distinctive elevated canopy and swirling stairwell. The curriculum also takes local context as a starting point, structured in themes to answer community-led questions. Its key function, like all the other offspaces, is storytelling. And the story it tells best is about institution-building as art. (Author: , Senior Researcher, Centre for Humanities Research — Platform: SA-UK Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture & Technics, University of the Western Cape) (Disclosure Statement: The research behind this article was supported by the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy at UCT's African Centre for Cities, where the author was previously affiliated.)
