Category: Nutrition

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Spoiled by choice: Food crisis or malnutrition?

Cancel any plans you may have for Thursday and Friday next week.

Starting at noon GMT on Thursday 14 April, the World Bank hosts a “global chat forum about the food crisis.” A quarter of an hour later, a hop, skip and jump away at the International Food Policy Research Institute, there’s a seminar on Prospects for Golden Rice under the rubric Leveraging Agriculture to Improve Human Nutrition. You can watch the IFPRI seminar as a live webcast, which should end at 17:45 GMT. Luckily the global chat forum is, at least as far as I can tell, scheduled to continue for 24 hours, so you may not miss too much. (You can always follow the Twitter hashtags #foodcrisis and #wblive.) And if you’re not too exhausted, there’ll be a live webcast of World Bank assembled experts discussing ideas submitted by the public starting at 14:00 GMT on Friday 15 April.

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Mapping aid

Thanks to CIAT’s Meike for news that

InterAction has just launched an interactive US Food Security Aid Map that provides detailed project-level information on food security and agriculture work being done by their member NGOs. The site can be browsed by location, sector, organization or project.

Here’s the map of agriculture projects: ((478 of 776 projects))

As coincidence would have it, one of the projects is the orange-fleshed sweet potato work we mentioned in a recent post.

Searching on “agrobiodiversity” yielded nothing, but there were a few hits with “diversification.” Well worth exploring in a bit more detail. If only to identify places where some pre-emptive germplasm collecting might be in order.

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More on the orange sweet potato story

The author of the orange-fleshed sweet potato paper I talked about a couple of days ago has kindly informed me that the answer to the question I posed is that the impact of the dissemination of these new varieties in Uganda has indeed been measured, but just hasn’t been published yet. There was apparently a big multidisciplinary study in 2007-2009 both in Uganda and Mozambique, and the results are due to come out in the near future. Good to hear, and many thanks, Robert. In the meantime, we have the following snippet from an IFPRI publication to whet our collective, er, appetite.

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Nibbles: Lupine, Methane, Food crisis, Nutritionists, Carrots, Poi, Barhal, Mung bean, Invasives, European bison, Mango

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That elusive nutritional impact

Maybe it’s all the nutrition stuff going on here and at Vaviblog lately, but when I finally tried to catch up with a couple of papers from the recent special issue of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability on “Sustainable intensification: increasing productivity in African food and agricultural systems,” one thing struck above all else. And that was that both in the case of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes in Uganda and indigenous African vegetables in East Africa, there is still no evidence of a nutritional or health impact of adoption of that particular agrobiodiversity.

Ex ante predictions, sure. Economic impacts, plenty. Even in some cases nutritional impact of the same intervention (those orange sweet potatoes) in another place (South Africa). Maybe the impact on health and nutrition is there and just hasn’t been measured, or it has been measured but hasn’t been published yet. Or maybe it’s just too early for such an impact to have manifested itself. But when it comes to the specific agrobiodiversity cases of sweet potatoes in Uganda and traditional greens in East Africa, it seems to me that the biggest documented impact of so far has been on income.

Will someone out there set me straight? Please!

Oh, and since I’m at it, there’s a paper out by an old friend from the Pacific on a quick method of measuring some nutritional variables in sweet potatoes.