Having just visited yartsa gunbu collection areas in SW Qinghai's Gyegu / Yushu / JyekundoTibetan Autonomous Prefecture early June 2011 it was evident that 2011 will be a year with a harvest below average. Some locals estimated 60 to 70% of last years harvest, which was a banner year. A Gyegu dealer suspected only half the production of 2010.
However, the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas have many different climate zones and I was hoping that some other areas would report a better harvest, but that seems not to be the case. I was also told from Garze / Ganzi / Kandze TAP in West Sichuan that this season is not very good and today I saw a newspaper article out of Bhutan that writes about the reduced harvest there. Since these a quite distinct areas located far apart on the Plateau, it seems like the whole harvest in 2011 will be lower than in 2010 and probably also below 2009 and 2008, but there are no reliable data to lift any of this out of sheer speculation. Still, since the 2010 harvest was so high it was to be expected that that the 2011 harvest would be bellow 2010 was to expected.
However, the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas have many different climate zones and I was hoping that some other areas would report a better harvest, but that seems not to be the case. I was also told from Garze / Ganzi / Kandze TAP in West Sichuan that this season is not very good and today I saw a newspaper article out of Bhutan that writes about the reduced harvest there. Since these a quite distinct areas located far apart on the Plateau, it seems like the whole harvest in 2011 will be lower than in 2010 and probably also below 2009 and 2008, but there are no reliable data to lift any of this out of sheer speculation. Still, since the 2010 harvest was so high it was to be expected that that the 2011 harvest would be bellow 2010 was to expected.
Yartsa Gunbu being dried over a yak dung heated stove sitting on top of a cooking pot full of boiling water. In the background in the tent a nomad cleaning fresh yartsa gunbu with a plastic hair brush.
The Gyegu / Yushu Yartsa Gunbu market is happening on June 6. It takes place in front of a lone building that survived that devastating April 2010 earthquake. In the back a destroyed building. The blue tents are omnipresent in Gyegu, since over 90% of the houses were lost. Although there is lot of construction activity right now, the extended frost period that stops the use of concrete slows down reconstruction considerably. Basically the hole town functions out of blue tents. In the morning of this day there was another earth small tremor.