Independence Award
- First Rank - Second Rank - Third Rank
Labour Award
- First Rank - Second Rank -Third Rank
National Award
- Study on food stuff for animal(2005)
- Study on rice breeding for export and domestic consumption(2005)
VIFOTEC Award
- Hybrid Maize by Single Cross V2002 (2003)
- Tomato Grafting to Manage Ralstonia Disease(2005)
- Cassava variety KM140(2010)
![]() |
|
![]() |
|
Cactus pear deserves a place on the menu
Monday, 2017/12/04 | 08:17:41
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Figure: Ethiopia’s Tigray region has around 360,000 hectares of cactus plantations of which half are managed on farms. The hardy plant can thrive despite degraded soils and hot temperatures. Photos: FAO/Giulio Napolitano, FAO/Filippo Brasesco
Turning a useful food-of-last-resort into a managed and valuable crop
FAO December 1 2017
Cactus plants need not be prickly and can act as precious natural resources, especially in dryland areas where they can make important food-security contributions for people and livestock.
FAO gathered experts on the hardy plant to pool their knowledge in a bid to help farmers and policy makers make more strategic and efficient use of landscapes often dismissed as arid and infertile.
While most cacti are inedible, the Opuntia species has much to offer, especially if treated like a crop rather than a weed run wild. Today the agriculturally relevant Opuntia ficus-indica subspecies – whose spines have been bred out but return after stress events – is naturalized in 26 countries beyond its native range. Its hardy persistence makes it both a useful food of last resort and an integral part of sustainable agricultural and livestock systems.
Cactus pear cultivation is slowly catching on, boosted by growing need for resilience in the face of drought, degraded soils and higher temperatures. It has a long tradition in its native Mexico, where yearly per capita consumption of nopalitos – the tasty young pads, known as cladodes – is 6.4 kilograms. Opuntias are grown on small farms and harvested in the wild on more than 3 million hectares, and increasingly grown using drip irrigation techniques on smallholder farms as a primary or supplemental crop. Today, Brazil is home to more than 500,000 hectares of cactus plantations aimed to provide forage. The plant is also commonly grown on farms in North Africa and Ethiopia’s Tigray region has around 360,000 hectares of which half are managed.
See more: http://www.fao.org/fao-stories/article/en/c/1070166/ |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[ Other News ]___________________________________________________
|