Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Something else about agricultural biodiversity and health today. I’ve been following the diary that Adama Gondor has been keeping for the BBC — she runs a clinic in Kroo Bay, a notorious slum on the outskirts of Freetown, Liberia. The shanties of Kroo Bay are built on a garbage dump on the banks of a river, so Adama is very busy. If you wanted to have a picture in your mind of what extreme poverty and malnutrition and disease mean — but believe me I would understand it if you didn’t want to have such a picture in your mind — you should have a look at the website Save the Children have put together on Kroo Bay: it has some truly heartbreaking pictures and videos.

Anyway, I just wanted to say something about Adama’s post from a week or so back. It’s a sort of microcosmical illustration of various points we’ve been making about how important agrobiodiversity is — or, alas, could be — for development. A severely malnourished baby is brought in, and is eventually referred to a free therapeutic feeding centre in Freetown. She’s been eating nothing but rice porridge. So you start to think about how different things might have been if her mother had had access to leafy greens, or even Golden Rice for that matter. Both of which we’ve blogged about.

And then there’s the fact that the baby has been sick and has been given traditional herbal remedies — that’s all her mother could afford. Adama seems a bit ambivalent about this: she’s ok about externally applied remedies but thinks that internally administered preparations need to be better understood, especially if given to young babies. Again, we blogged a few times about initiatives around the world to study and “certify” traditional herbal medicines.