Category: Urban agriculture

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?