Category: Nutrition

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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.

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Nutritionist tells researchers what to eat shock

According to a report over at the Vaviblog, Bioversity’s nutritionist Jessica Fanzo was beset by questioners after her talk at the Vavilov Institute mentioned both the bad nutritional status of most Russians and the high nutritional value of some fruits and berries at the threatened Pavlovsk Experiment Station. She was bombarded with requests for advice. The Vaviblog’s correspondent reports:

One response stuck in my mind. Jessica was asked whether one couldn’t get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from pills. She said yes, but you have to get everything else from food, so why not the vitamins as well, by choosing your food better?

Especially if you like your potatoes processed and potable.

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Yo! Pavlovsk Politicos! Listen up!

Some of the accessions investigated by the project are nutritionally much more valuable than others. Thanks to the project, we know which berries they are. Thanks to Pavlovsk, we have the berries. On that basis alone, surely they’re more valuable than the land they occupy on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Let’s hope that the project team is successful in getting that policy message across tomorrow.

The Vaviblog reports on the first day of an important meeting, a round-up of the project on Conservation, characterization and evaluation for nutrition and health of vegetatively propagated crop collections at the Vavilov Institute.

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Zimbabwe revisited; please reward GardenAfrica

A couple of weeks ago I moaned that the description for a project to Support Zimbabwean smallholders to feed their communities and conserve their natural heritage had “failed to set my heart aflutter”. A little wordly magic has now been wrought on the proposal, which I now honestly believe gives a better picture of what the project is setting out to do. The very least you can now do is to reinforce GardenAfrica’s behaviour by heading over to the Coop site and voting for this proposal in the Tackling Global Poverty category.

Thanks.