The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog has a post pointing out the valuable lessons to be learned from the well-documented failure of a project to exploit the wild coffee of Kibale National Park in Uganda, thereby contributing to the park’s protection.
Remembering fondly my own experiences with wild coffee in the mountains of Abyssinia, I noted that Luigi, author of the piece, had mentioned only in passing the importance of wild coffee to breeding programmes. Quite right too; that was not the purpose of the Kibale Forest Wild Coffee project. So let me chime in. Coffea canephora, the species present in Kibale, has provided resistance to root-knot nematodes and is the basis of an interesting approach to improved production, based on hybrid seeds. The importance of wild coffee is evident. The importance of the post at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog less so. It is to win the author an all-expenses trip to India, where he will be able to blog, tweet and status World Environment Day. To help him do that, you need to follow these instructions:
I just entered @UNEPandYou @TreeHugger blogging contest to win trip to India for #WED2011. Read my post and please RT! http://bit.ly/jm7B8y
I’ll be doing just that. 
