Look how well this yucca has grown,” Julio Peñalozo says, digging up a large tuber and breaking it in two to show the firm, white edible part. “In these poor soils it would have been half this size without the fungi.” Around the small patch of yucca are banana trees, corn and eggplant, all growing vigorously thanks to fungi added to the soil. Peñalozo is a local leader in this poor rural community outside Barrancabermeja, a central Colombian city on the Magdalena River that is seeing some of the worst violence in this country’s decades-old civil war. Over the past two years, he and his co-workers have produced 90 metric tons of the mycorrhizal fungi, manufactured under license from a Cuban biotechnology company... [Log in to read more]