- A film about community gardens in the city of Washington DC.
- “Ricos en agrobiodiversidad, pero pobres en nutrición.” Huancavelica, in Peru, has plenty of agricultural biodiversity and plenty of malnutrition. Go figure.
- Good nutrition is more important than reduced calories for longevity, in rhesus monkeys at least.
- Conservation magazine reports that return on investment is the best guide to economically-efficient conservation. We ask … well, you know what we ask, right?
The Huancavelica Peru report is available in English as “Grupo Yanapai: Grant 09-033: Agrobiodiversity and Nutrition for Food Security of Chopcca Families in Huancavelica, Peru, Perú-(2009 – 2013)”. This is from a McKnight Foundation project apparently through Cornell.
They are growing crops at over 4000m. some 12 degrees south of the equator. I was interested as they have a big overlap with crops here at 58 degrees north in Scotland: potatoes, and the introduced barley, faba bean and oats, also greens that sound like kale (Sacha col – leafy Brassicas – very nutritious) and even sown pasture of rye grass and red clover mix – what our local farmer has just established a pasture from. Perhaps we should swap crops – our Scots Kale for their tarwi (lupin grain).
But the important point is that these crops are not so much `locally adapted’, as we are told repeatedly, as pre-adapted to what are certainly marginal conditions – high altitude there and high latitude here (in both cases there may be some within and between varietal selection – day-length must be very different and there it gets very cold every night – rather just in winter, when crops here are out of the ground). There must be dozens more crops from high altitudes in Ethiopia and the Himalayas that could help with nutrition in the Andes, and all those yummy fruits from lower altitudes in South America that could flourish in Africa and Asia.