- Rocket — and much else — hits Japan.
- OECD says agriculture and biodiversity interdependent! Seven years ago!
- Weird stuff that turns up when you have an alert for “genebank”.
- Nice take on that 100,000 year-old sorghum story. Will it change what the Palaeo diet people recommend?
Turkey making the most of its agrobiodiversity
I’m off for a few weeks’ holiday soon, but I couldn’t go without some reflections on my recent trip to Uzbekistan, via Turkey. I’ll post some photos from the main market in Tashkent later, but in the meantime, here’s a very rapid agrobiodiversity trifecta from a day’s transit in Istanbul.
First, I haven’t been in Turkey for a while, and I don’t remember vişne, or sour cherry, juice been available so readily commercially in cartons a few years back, along with more common staples like orange and apple juice. It’s delicious. Has anyone seen it in Europe?
Secondly, I was intrigued and impressed by the marketing work being done on the hazelnut. Turkish Airlines doesn’t give out peanuts with its drinks. It gives out attractive packets of dry hazelnuts. Again, very tasty, and a nice way of promoting local agrobiodiversity.
And finally, good to see salep, a traditional drink made from ground up orchid bulbs, on sale at the airport, and indeed featured in the in-flight magazine. Great to warm up after a morning wandering around Istanbul in a rainstorm.
Prize for GIS study of malnutrition and agrobiodiversity
Emmanuel Zapata Caldas, a geography student at the Universidad del Valle in Colombia, has won second prize at the XVIII National Geography Event for his work, carried out in collaboration with CIAT, on the spatial analysis of malnutrition in Latin America. Reproduced below are some of his results for Colombia, which he kindly made available to us (click to enlarge).
For this particular analysis, Emmanuel looked at the prevalence of anemia and used secondary data on poverty and agricultural production to identify sites in Colombia where the biofortification of different crops could have a significant impact on this aspect of malnutrition. Congratulations to Emmanuel for his prize, and his interesting work.
Nibbles: Camelids, Vineyards, Fermentation, Herb, Aquaculture, Bolivian interview, Sponges
- 5th European Symposium on South American Camelids.
- Wine makers count on biodiversity to help them out against pests.
- Sandor Katz, fermentation guru.
- Uttarkhand farmers turn to “herb.” Maybe they went to college here. Luigi comments: I’m on next flight.
- Kenyan governments counts on fish. Wont be holding my breath.
- Moises Jimenez, Bolivian farmer.
- Farming sponges. Not Luffa, the stuff in the sea!
PHIV in Rwanda feed themselves better
There’s a heart-warming story in The Atlantic Channel about a young woman, Emma Clippinger, who started an organization called Gardens for Health International, that helps people with HIV in Rwanda to grow the food that they need to ensure they respond well to anti-retroviral drugs.
That sounds awfully complicated, but apparently it wasn’t.
Many of the country’s HIV patients did not have access to ample food. HIV/AIDS drugs work most effectively when patients are eating a sound diet. They work poorly when patients are malnourished. … Healthy Rwandans were taking charge of their food supply. But AIDS/HIV victims were excluded from these governmental programs because they were deemed physically incapable of participating.
The effort is spreading, and what is really nice is that it makes full use of agrobiodiversity to deliver better nutrition and health:
“Crops are chosen mostly on the basis of their nutritional value.” They include papaya, avocados, amaranth, spiderplant, cowpea, soy beans, beets, swiss chard, collards, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, chili pepper, tephrosia and … “some sunflowers (for their seed, for their aesthetic value!)”. Growers have been especially enthusiastic about indigenous greens called dodo and isogi, which have a higher iron and vitamin A concentration than spinach. Provisional ingenuity prevails: pesticides include neem, garlic, and chili peppers; multivitamins come in the form of leaves from the moringa tree; old tires serve as planters; no kitchen gray water is wasted.
Staples too. What we need to know is: what are dodo and isogi?