Here’s a turn-up for the books. A newspaper article headlined New farming practices grow healthier children actually delivers some specifics.
The article reports on a project called Soils, Food and Healthy Communities, a joint effort by Canada and Malawi, and I’m ashamed to say (or can I blame the project’s communications?) that I knew nothing about it.
The evidence of healthier children?
Ten years ago Joyce Mhoni, head of the Nutrition Rehabilitation Unit at Ekwendeni Hospital in the Mzimba district of northern Malawi, would have been caring for to up to 30 severely malnourished children at a time. Today, at the peak of the usually lean months between December and April, when farmers are waiting to harvest, the unit is empty, and in the whole of 2010 only 15 children were admitted, mostly from outside the hospital’s catchment area.
I know, it’s only anecdotal, but be patient. There’s lots more in the article, which explains that the changes stem from the SFHC project’s decision, around 2000, to open an Agricultural Office at the hospital.
[T]he project’s staff taught farmers how to grow different varieties of legumes such as soy beans, peanuts, and peas. They were encouraged to grow a deep-rooted variety of legume, such as pigeon pea, in the same field as a shallow-rooted variety like soy bean, a method known as inter-cropping.
Soy bean is high-yielding and a nutritious food source, while pigeon pea produces a large amount of leaves that can be dug into the soil to make an effective natural fertilizer.
Pigeon pea is also rather good to eat, but leave that aside. There’s lots more lovely human interest stuff in the article, and another one at the BBC, about the project’s profound impact on families: new houses, school fees, better health, a life without hunger. At which point, of course, the hard-to-please scientist asks for solid evidence in a peer-reviewed journal. Will this do?
There was an improvement over initial conditions of up to 0.6 in weight-for-age Z-score (WAZ; from -0.4 (SD 0.5) to 0.3 (SD 0.4)) for children in the longest involved villages, and an improvement over initial conditions of 0.8 in WAZ for children in the most intensely involved villages (from -0.6 (SD 0.4) to 0.2 (SD 0.4)).
And there’s more where that come from, which is here: Effects of a participatory agriculture and nutrition education project on child growth in northern Malawi. ((Bezner Kerr R, Berti PR, & Shumba L (2010). Effects of a participatory agriculture and nutrition education project on child growth in northern Malawi. Public health nutrition, 1-7 PMID: 21059284))
I wonder whether SFHC has considered going large and promoting other forms of agricultural and dietary diversity?
