(Not much) agrobiodiversity on display in Nairobi museum

The main building of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi has had a facelift, courtesy of the EU. Pretty good job on the outside, but the new exhibits were a bit of a disappointment.

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There’s a big hall about Kenya’s animals, of course, and another series of displays about its cultures, arranged by life-stages (birth, youth, adolescence, initiation: you get the picture), though this includes very little about agriculture:

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But there’s nothing at all on the country’s ecosystems and protected areas, and nothing on its plants, at least inside the building (apart from a display of an herbarium specimen in the small hall describing the museum’s history). There is a little botanic garden dedicated to medicinal plants (arranged by family, the wisdom of which is debatable), but this misses the opportunity of describing the Amaranthus on display as not just a medicinal but also a nutritious traditional leafy green (see my next post):

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However, the entrance hall does have a terrific display of cucurbit diversity:

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These bottle gourds are used by the Maasai and other pastoralists to store water, milk, blood, and mixtures thereof. Here’s a close-up:

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Say it ain’t so

A CREDIT paper now out in Food Policy uses some fancy maths to suggest that the health and nutritional status of Rwandese rural people is more dependent on how much beans, sweet potatoes and other crops they produce, rather than on their income. That’s because of “market imperfections,” which is a polite way of saying that there are no markets. A sobering thought for those development agencies which pin all their hopes on the private sector. The author doesn’t discuss this, but I would have thought the dataset is a suitable one to investigate the relationship between dietary diversity (using the proxy of production diversity) and health. Tragically — and actually rather surprisingly — output of local beer has a significant negative effect on nutrition and no effect on health.

Bottled vegetables

After I learned a lot about container gardening from Prof. Dr. Willem Van Cotthem in Belgium, my life has changed for a better, because in otherwise useless plastic bottles and plastic bags I can now grow vegetables to produce food for my family, as well as beautify my home with beautiful flowers. At the same time, I am cleaning the environment around my house.

Read more about how Patrick Harry Dimusa has taken to container gardening in Malawi. And speaking of Prof. Dr. Willem Van Cotthem in Belgium, whom God preserve, I wonder what happened to his open-pollinated melon seed scheme? I know I sent some …

Orange revolution

Sweetpotatoes come in different colors and tastes (and sizes). The “yams” eaten in the United States are sweet and have orange and moist flesh. The staple of parts of Africa and the Pacific (and pig feed in China), is typically white-fleshed and not very sweet nor moist (notwithstanding variations like this purple variety.)

Anyway, the orange fleshed sweetpotato is stacked with beta-carotene, the stuff you need to eat for your body to make vitamin A. Many poor people have vitamin A deficiencies, which leads to stunted growth and blindness. So why don’t the poor sweetpotato eaters eat orange fleshed varieties? In part because they simply do not have them, or know about their health benefits. In part because they do not grow well in Africa (decimated by pests and diseases). And also because they do not taste right: too sweet for a staple.

The International Potato Center and partners have been trying to fix all that. Now they have made a nice video about getting orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes into the food-chain in Mozambique. The orange revolution:

https://vimeo.com/2278794

I wonder if they also promote mixing more sweetpotato leaves into the diet — even of white fleshed varieties. The leaves are a very good source of micro-nutrients, including beta-carotene! More fodder for the biofortification discussion.