- Bill Gates Accepts Hunger Award, Says Focus on Poor Farmers “More Important Than Ever“. Go Bill!
- Small farmer in Mozambique doing well by doing good.
- Ancient Romans drank in South Tyneside. What else was there to do?
- Ancient Americans moved down the coast. That’s where the food was.
- Rewarding excellent chocolate from smallholder farmers.
- Food & Communication: Recipes for Development. IFPRI plays TED on Thursday.
- Climate change adaptation and mitigation: just do it! A. Jarvis comes out storming.
- West African farmers ‘already adapting to climate change’. A. Jarvis picks up his ball and goes home.
- Desperately seeking heirloom apples in Idaho.
Brainfood: Football nutrition, Sorghum markers, Alpine herb, Gap analysis, Evolutionary breeding, Aphids, Birds and farmland, Cameroon forests
- Nutrition and culture in professional football: A mixed method approach. Footballers need a more diverse diet. Well, kinda. I just wanted to get this paper in here because wouldn’t it be cool if we could get Lionel Messi to talk about agrobiodiversity-rich diets?
- Diversity analysis using ISSR markers for resistance to shoot pests in sorghum. There may be a diversity of resistance mechanisms.
- Domestication of Alpine blue-sow-thistle (Cicerbita alpina (L.) Wallr.): six year trial results. I know. Why would you want to, right? Takes all sorts to make a diverse diet, I guess. Maybe we can get Lionel Messi to eat it?
- Improving representativeness of genebank collections through species distribution models, gap analysis and ecogeographical maps. Fancy GIS-based prioritization results in more, better germplasm collecting. Nice to have the data.
- Evolutionary Plant Breeding in Cereals—Into a New Era. Martin Wolfe and colleagues lay it on the line; why it is a good idea, and what the obstacles are.
- Genetic interactions influence host preference and performance in a plant-insect system. Aphids and barleys have genetic preferences for one another.
- Pasture area and landscape heterogeneity are key determinants of bird diversity in intensively managed farmland. As in the northern hemisphere, so too in Argentina.
- Tree diversity and conservation value of Ngovayang’s lowland forests, Cameroon. Both high, and I’m betting some economically important trees are among them.
Nibbles: Coffee pix, Afghanistan pix, #GROW, #GORTA
- It’s been coffee week at Old Picture of the Day.
- More pictures. Afghanistan’s silk industry this time.
- It’s been #GROW Week too.
- Jess at Gorta. Follow #gorta for live updates.
Nibbles: Chickens, Millet adoption, Specialty crops, World Food Day, Migrating forests, Vietnamese pheasants, Yews, High prices, Genebank tour, Climate change conference.
- Why did the Chinese chicken cross the road? To get a new date. For domestication, that is.
- The Indian Farmer is actually three, millet-wise.
- USDA wades into specialty crops. Wonder if one of them is baobab, and a factsheet is involved. Or “small scale grains” for that matter.
- “Life in the countryside is hard.” But fear not, FAO is on it.
- Forests are not migrating. Species are actually undergoing range contraction at both ends. Well that’s weird.
- The first pheasant extinction? Say it ain’t so.
- I like pictures of old trees. So sue me.
- Jess stops traffic.
- Tour a cocoa genebank. Could this catch on?
- International Conference on Climate Change and Food Security (ICCCFS). Not hot air.
Taking nutritional data to the PNG public #BAD11
I recently posted the following quote on the Biodiversity for Nutrition group.
Papua New Guinea’s taro and aibika are high in Iron and Zinc compounds which are important for human health but such nutritional information is not available for the public, says Nelson Simbiken, a PhD student at the Australian National University in Canberra.
The quote comes from a blog on PNG agriculture, and I must say I expected a strong reaction. I was not disappointed. This has just come in in reply from Wila Saweri-van Hulzen, who worked as a nutritionist in the Department of Health in PNG for some 20 years. 1
There is information on the nutrition composition of PNG foods. It may not be recent, and it may be applicable to small part of the country, but it is available.
Brand JC, Thomas DE and Hyndman D. Composition of the subsistence foods of the Wopkaimin people of Papua New Guinea. PNG Medical Journal 34:35-48, 1991.
It gives information on taro and Hibiscus manihot (or aibika).
Ohtsuka R, Kawabe T, Inaoka T, Suzuki T, Hongo T, Akimichi T, Sugahara T. Composition of local and purchased foods consumed by the Gidra in lowland Papua. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 15:159-169, 1984.
The Pacific Islands food composition tables, 2nd edition, FAO, Rome, 2004 used this information in its food composition tables. The difficulty is that these tables uses Fijian local food names, so the name edible hibiscus is used, rather than aibika. (Appendix VI lists aibika and refers to edible hibiscus.) The scientific name is Abelmoschus manihot or Hibiscus manihot.
The South Pacific Commission 2 in Noumea (New Caledonia) has published several booklets and leaflets with food composition information. A few are The Leaves We Eat, The Fruits We Eat, The Staples We Eat. Again, they use Fijian local names, so one has to figure out what the PNG name would be.
At the moment I have no internet access, so I am unable to read the newsletter.
That’s surely correct. And I could add other sources. There are plenty of data on the nutritional composition of Pacific foods. But are these data available to “the public” in PNG? That, I think, was Mr Simbiken’s original point, and I think it’s a good one. The answer must be no, if the data are only published in obscure journals and under Fijian names. But I can’t believe that’s the case. I seem to remember seeing posters in tok pisin extolling the health virtues of various local foods. Someone please tell me I didn’t just imagine them.