Category: Information

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Prota4U: stopped making sense.

I’ve only lately begun to sip from the firehose that is Twitter. Many things about it puzzle me, but not unduly. One thing I do find odd is the feed called Prota4U. It’s an arm of The Prota Foundation, and Prota stands for Plant Resources of Tropical Africa. The Foundation’s aims are entirely laudable:

It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information through Webdatabases, Books, CD-Rom’s and Special Products. … The objectives are to bring the published information, now accessible to the resourceful happy few, into the public domain. This will contribute to greater awareness and sustained use of the ‘world heritage of African useful plants’, with due respect for traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights.

One could quibble with the details, but the overall idea is sound. Prota4U — groovy to the nth degree — publishes an endless stream of tweets, roughly one every three minutes while it is awake, that don’t link to anything, often don’t say much, and frequently have nothing to do with useful plants of Tropical Africa. This particular rant was occasioned by this tweet:

Avena sativa — It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour.

Fascinating. Just the thing to nibble on with my breakfast oats. But so what? And the tweet doesn’t go anywhere either. Annoyed, I Googled that descriptive phrase. And found it in two places. One, Plants for a Future’s database entry for Avena ludoviciana. The other, this tweet from Prota4U:

Avena byzantina – It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour.

That too goes nowhere.

Of course in the greater scheme of things what Prota does with its information is no concern of mine, and I could simply stop following. I’m just totally puzzled by what it thinks it is doing. Someone, anyone, put me out of my misery, please.

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Research on Ethiopian food insecurity not very joined up?

The Drylands Coordination Group (DCG) is a network for capacity building through exchange of practical experience and appropriate knowledge on food security in the drylands of Africa.

And a huge amount of very detailed research they are doing too, in Mali, Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia. But one does have to wonder how much “exchange of practical experience” is really taking place. Take two reasonably recent reports from Ethiopia.

One, entitled “The Levels, Determinants and Coping Mechanisms of Food Insecure Households in Southern Ethiopia” (published Feb. 2009) makes no mention of diversity within crops at all. In fact, it even conflates crops, by measuring household economic status as the “average amount of wheat per person (all household production converted into wheat term).” Surely it makes a difference to the “levels, determinants and coping mechanisms of food insecure households” whether they are producing only one variety of wheat, several varieties of wheat, or both wheat and other cereals.

Compare that with another DCG study, entitled “Seed system impact on farmers’ income and crop biodiversity in the drylands of southern Tigray” (published Jan. 2009). This goes into great detail on the different varieties of each of the cereal crops in the study area.

Surely the two teams could have talked?

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Online forum on agrobiodiversity for nutrition

I’m not sure if we made a big enough deal of our friend Danny’s new venture, a Yahoo Group on Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition:

Currently we live in a world where a growing number of people suffer the consequences of a lack of vital nutrients due to dietary simplification and neglect of more nutritious options. This list is run by a small group of people associated with the UNEP/GEF supported “Mainstreaming Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition” project who are dedicated to reversing this situation. The list is specifically designed to bring people together who have a common interest in the use of biodiversity, wild and cultivated, for improving nutrition, health and wellbeing.

The latest post looks at a paper on fortification:

This paper was shared by a colleague and may be of interest to some. Although it deals with fortified blended foods and in emergency or food aid situations targetting largely children it does raise a few very important issues relevant to agrobiodiverse food and diets and nutrition and health. Most importantly, it highlights the general lack of evidence for the efficacy and effectiveness of the interventions described in the paper for improving nutritional and health outcomes and just how few interventions plan for undertaking such impact studies. Further, it demonstrates how complex a challenge it is to try and demonstrate such linkages between food intervention and nutrition and health outcomes.

Well worth joining.

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Nibbles: Rice conservation and use, Tunisian genebank, Buno, Popcorn, Sustainability, Brazilian social networking, Strawberry breeding, Sunflower genomics, Climate change and fisheries