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Taking nutrition seriously in Africa

This commentary — The Sterile Nutrition Debate — has been sitting in my in tray for a couple of months because I really didn’t know what to do with it. In it an industrial chemist called Basil Kransdorff argues that the medical establishment and policy makers have consistently failed to take good nutrition seriously. They either regard it as a panacea or as useless, neither of which sees it as an essential component both of good health and of the ability to fight disease.

Confront most doctors on this issue and they will agree that nutrition is key. But getting doctors to engage with nutrition as a science and to implement it in patient management is another issue. They become confused. Where they accept that nutrients are not medicines, even when they bring health to a diseased body, they cannot bring themselves to dispense appropriate nutrients, arguing either that this will encourage dependence, or that food and nutrition are a private issue, and if handed out, should be cheap. Ironically, where doctors believe that nutrients are in fact treatments, there are incessant demands for clinical trials, designed around drug trial protocols, to prove the obvious that nutrition is good for you.

Drum Beat aims to generate discussion, and there has certainly been plenty of that. Most of it is focussed on HIV/AIDS, but there does seem to be a recognition that good nutrition is good for people, and good nutrition requires agricultural biodiversity: end of story.

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Making grains relevant

The low-carb craze of a few years back has spoiled the nutritional reputation of cereal grains, and it is up to the industry to get people eating them again. So said Francesco Pantò of the pasta giant Barilla yesterday at the first European congress of the American Association of Cereal Chemists International (AACCI), in Montpellier. He suggested five ways to do that:

  1. develop new durum wheat varieties and special products that can differentiate them, as for grapes and wine
  2. market grains as mainstream and everyday products
  3. use innovative technology to incorporate new grains into familiar products
  4. aim for convenience, and promote the goodness of cereals and fiber
  5. add extra components to cereal products in order to make them into a more complete meal

The first of these will of course be particularly welcome by those of us interested in agricultural biodiversity, and I wonder whether pseudocereals like buckwheat and quinoa might also find a place under the third point.

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Organic agriculture

FAO has a paper out on organic agriculture, as part of the International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security, going on in Rome as I type. Here’s a quote:

The strongest feature of organic agriculture is its reliance on fossil-fuel independent and locally-available production assets; working with natural processes increases cost-effectiveness and resilience of agro-ecosystems to climatic stress. By managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental services to intensify production in a sustainable way.

Those are some of the strengths, and very significant they are too. An often-quoted weakness of organic agriculture, however, is that yields are often lower than what you’d expect from “conventional” agriculture. But why? Well, according to a recent study using wheat as a model, part of the reason is that the varieties used are poorly adapted to the particular conditions of organic agriculture: “increasing yield in organic systems through breeding will require direct selection within organic systems rather than indirect selection in conventional systems… With crop cultivars bred in and adapted to the unique conditions inherent in organic systems, organic agriculture will be better able to realize its full potential as a high-yielding alternative to conventional agriculture.”

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Drought resistance

A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.