One of the most useful contacts we made while visiting India was with the Institut Français de Pondichéry. Dr Claude Garcia and colleagues are working on building a database on agronomic conditions in coffee plantations around the Western Ghats. We hope to work with Dr Garcia to see whether this type of information could be usefully included in a fair tracing system:
The Department of Ecology aims to understand and assess biological diversity in both natural and human-transformed ecosystems as a contribution to improved practices of sustainable management and conservation. These areas of research are closely associated with other global concerns such as water conservation, carbon sequestration and climatic changes. Special interest has long been devoted to fragile and useful mangroves and to biodiversity-rich forest ecosystems, on which considerable expertise and information have been gained over several decades of laboratory and fieldwork.