Namibia: Chilli Bombs to Save Northern Crops

ROSEMARY Poniso is a widow, and poor, and just a few nights ago the elephants came and ate all her tomato crop. But there is another precious crop that might save the day: chillies.
Rosemary heard about the chilli farming project from the agricultural extension office in 2008, and together with some other women went to a meeting to find out about it. The idea came from Zambia, just across the river, and was new to Namibia. The RPRP set up nurseries for chilli plants, and trained some farmers, called distributors, to grow the plants from seed. Each nursery has up to 5 000 seedlings. The distributors sell young plants to chilli farmers like Rosemary for a few cents each.
Growing the chillies was hard work at first, because they had to be watered every day, and the well was some distance away. Water had to be hauled up in buckets and carried across to the field. Two of the ten women in Rosemary's group gave up. But not Rosemary, who has learnt to cut back the chillies in winter, and to begin irrigating again after the rains. Luckily, a new water pump has been installed next to the field, and the ladies have lashed up a pipe to water the chillies.

Rosemary's group is just one of many growing chillies. One of the RPRP field officers was Tererai Msakwa, a cheerful Zimbabwean lady who is now the coordinator of the Country Pilot Programme that has taken over the project. She explains that the big hope is the export market. In the third year of the project they sold eight tonnes of wet chilli via Zambia to the USA, for use in Tabasco.
Although chillies can be dried, 'wet' chilli is more valuable for sauce production. The farmers hand pick the ripe chillies daily, and sort the best grade. Then they are mechanically crushed into a pulp and put into airtight containers. These are brought to a specially built shed and placed with salt into drums in hygienic conditions. The drums are exported to Zambia, and from there on to other buyers. If production could reach 20 tonnes a year, it would be worthwhile exporting directly to South Africa and the USA.

High hopes, but the ending of the Rural Poverty Reduction Programme funding in 2009 left the villagers wondering what would happen next, and the Country Pilot Programme has yet to revive their fortunes. First step will be the introduction of a farmers' association to run the business when donor funding dries up. The farmers' association should buy the chillies from the farmers, and market them.
That would be good news for Rosemary. At the moment her only surplus income is from crops like tomatoes, which might bring in N$2 000 a year - not much. Her first chilli harvest brought N$1 500, but that was sold dry. For wet chilli she should get N$7 500 from her small plot, and she could expand her production, provided the marketing infrastructure is there.
In the meantime another organisation, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC) buys the dried chilli from the project. Why? To make chilli bombs! Villagers are taught by IRDNC to mix elephant dung with dried chillies. These are placed around the crop fields at night and set alight. The slow burning and pungent mixture keeps the elephants away. Rosemary hasn't been taught to do it yet, but a few chilli bombs would come in handy for protecting her tomatoes.

Bones of elephant ancestors found

The Omani Barytherium is the first one to be found in the Sultanate and represent the oldest ancestors of elephant (Barytherium). It was found in Aidum area in Dhofar by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture and brought to Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) for identification. Geologists Prof Sobhi Nasir and Dr Abdulrahman al Harthy from the SQU and Dr Erick Seifert from the Stoony Brook University, US, visited the area and found a large area of elephant bones known as elephant grabs where they found and collected large quantities of bones to be identified.
The group of researchers from SQU, Stony Brook and the ministry are still working on these bones and they are expecting new discoveries in the area. They said that this finding is extremely important as it gives the first evidence of the oldest ancestors of elephant found in the world. The scientists named the new finding as Barytherium Omansi. Barytherium (meaning heavy beast) is a genus of an extinct family (Barytheriidae) of primitive proboscidean that lived during the late Eocene and early Oligocene in North Africa.
The Barytheriidae were the first large size proboscideans to appear in the fossil records and were characterised by a strong sexual dimorphism. The only known species within this family is Barytherium grave, found at the beginning of the 20th century in the Fayum, Egypt. More complete specimens have been found since then at Dor el Talha, Libya. In some respects, these animals would have looked similar to a modern Asian Elephant, but with a more slender build.
The most visible difference, however, would have been the tusks. Barytherium had eight very short tusks, four each in the upper and lower jaws, which resembled those of a modern hippopotamus more than those of an elephant. The upper pairs were vertical, while the lower pairs projected forwards from the mouth horizontally. Together, these would have made a shearing action for cropping plants.
Paleontologists know a lot more about Barytherium’s tusks, which tend to preserve better in the fossil record than soft tissue, than they do about its trunk. This prehistoric elephant had eight short, stubby tusks, four in its upper jaw and four in its lower jaw, but to date no one has unearthed any evidence for its proboscis (which may or may not have looked like that of a modern elephant).
Bear in mind, though, that Barytherium wasn’t directly ancestral to modern elephants; rather, it represented an evolutionary side branch of mammals combining elephant-like and hippo-like characteristics.