Category: Mainstream

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Interacting nutrients

We’re always saying how agrobiodiversity includes all kinds of different things — crops, livestock, wild relatives, pollinators, microbes — which interact in often complex ways. Mess with one part, and you often unintentionally affect another.

Well, it looks like those interactions continue once the products of agrobiodiversity are harvested and eaten. A review described in ScienceDaily today says that people should worry less about individual nutrients and

shift the focus toward the benefits of entire food products and food patterns in order to better understand nutrition in regard to a healthy human body.

For example, there is little evidence, according to the researchers, of long-term health benefits from taking isolated supplements of beta-carotene and B-vitamins, or from reducing total fats.

In contrast, myriad observations have been made of improved long-term health for foods and food patterns that incorporate these same nutrients naturally occurring in food.

So it’s the foodway as a whole, rather than intake of individual nutrients, that needs to be optimized. Which I guess should give pause to those — like me! — who hope that, for example, things like deep yellow sweet potatoes or bananas will solve the problem of vitamin A deficiency.

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Eat more crap!

It’s a little too preciously written for my taste, but the article at SFGate.com a couple of days back says some sensible things about bugs. Basically, its message is not to be so scared of bacteria on food. They’re agricultural biodiversity too, and can be good for us, essential even. Unfortunately,

the cultural mind-set at large runs directly opposite. So much so that we could be, in effect, cleaning and scrubbing and protecting ourselves to death, as our immune systems whimper and wither and drug-resistant bacteria get nastier and nature always, always finds a way to thwart our silly efforts to eradicate its wild side.

Hence the exhortation in my title, which I’ve nicked from the text of the article. Thanks, Ruthie.

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War bad for seeds, seeds good for peace

We asked Jacob van Etten to write about war and agricultural biodiversity after seeing his great website. It’s just coincidence that he sent the following piece in right after we blogged about flooding and genetic erosion. Sometimes things work out that way. Thanks, Jacob. We’re always open to guest contributions…

War can be disastrous for the environment. Think about forest destruction in Kurdistan or burning oil wells in Iraq. But we know very little about agrobiodiversity losses caused by armed conflict. Some time ago, a team of geographers wrote an alarming article about maize biodiversity in Guatemala, where a war raged in the 1980s. They claimed that war and modernization had caused a massive disappearance of indigenous maize varieties. This was based on a quick study of several townships.

However, in a recent restudy, which involved more intensive sampling in a single township, it became clear that several maize varieties were still hiding in the corners. Variety loss was in fact rather low and no varieties were reported to be lost due to the war. What seemed to have changed over the last decades was the social distribution of seeds and knowledge, suggestive of a disrupted social exchange network.

As other studies in Rwanda and West Africa have given similar results, a general picture seems to emerge. The problem is often not the physical survival of seeds and varieties during war. They may be conserved by those who stay in the village or recovered after the violence from fields and secret storages. The main problem is that war destroys the social and economic tissue that underpins agricultural diversity management. Mistrust and poverty will limit the circulation of seeds, leading to access problems and a fragmented local knowledge system. There may thus be a lot of sense in a project of CARE by Sierra Leone that turned the problem of seeds and war on its head. It used the distribution of seeds as a way to evoke discussion on the principles of social exclusion and the causes of the armed conflict.