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When did you stop beating your wife? The micronutrient edition

Nicholas Kristof was at the Biofortification Conference, telling the audience How to Get Micronutrient Malnutrition on the Public Health Agenda. 1 The organizers took the opportunity to capture the great man’s thoughts on video. And guess what? He thinks biofortification is more sustainable than supplements, even though, as he said:

Biofortification is in a sense unproven. We can’t be sure that these experiments in improving underlying foods are going to be scalable, that customers are going to accept them … there are things that can go wrong. But on the other hand, if you rely forever on drops or pills then that’s always going to cost money. It’s not sustainable in the same way. If you can get people to substitute the kind of rice they eat, the kind of bananas the eat, the kind of wheat they eat, then you’ve solved these nutrition problems that have been with us for all of human history. Is it going to work? We can’t be sure, but it’s a pretty good bet and it sure is exciting.

Absolutely spot on Nicholas. And given the two options your interviewer offered, I’d probably have answered in similar vein. But, er, did no one at the conference mention dietary diversity? Not even in the corridors where the video was filmed.

The value of dietary diversity is not unproven. People do eat diverse diets. And the approach is genuinely sustainable, quite apart from other benefits that come with increased agricultural biodiversity. It’s not a bet, it’s a racing certainty. And it is obviously being ignored by an influential sector of the community.

So, I’ve another topic for Mr Kristof and anyone else who cares to weigh in: How to get Dietary Diversity on the Solutions to Micronutrient Malnutrition Agenda.

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Farmers spread with farming

I was going to attempt to read and comment on a recent paper in PLOS Biology myself, but fortunately smarter people than me, who understand the subject better, got there first. So all I need to do is point you to Razib Khan’s explanation of how recent DNA analyses confirm “tentatively” the idea that farming didn’t spread into Europe as a result of people imitating their neighbours. Instead, the DNA suggests that spread was:

[A] classic demic diffusion process. This is basically a very simple model whereby farmers with larger population growth rates expand into the “space” of hunter-gatherers.

Now to do the same with their crops and livestock?

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Tools for non-fools

We often prattle blithely about how exciting this and that might be if only we could gather the data by getting people to do this or that with their mobile phones. Of course, neither of us has any idea what that might entail in real life. Nor do we intend to find out. You, however, may be different, and crying out for the right tools to do the job. Here, then, thanks to a work colleague, are two important documents. An introduction to collecting data from mobile phones, and the associated matrix comparing different tools.

So off you go. And let us know how you get on.

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Yes, Nagoya backs ITPGRFA, kinda sorta

The Q&A on the Nagoya Protocol with UNEP expert Balakrishna Pisupati has only elicited three questions so far, but at least Dr Pisupati seems to agree with Bioversity’s Michael Halewood on what the Protocol means for the ITPGRFA:

This agreement is to be read in support of the ITPGRFA. Parties to the CBD had long discussions on the relationship between this Protocol and the ITPGRFA and came to the conclusion that it will not run counter to the objectives or scope of the ITPGRFA and will be complimenting the provisions under the ITPGRFA.

Phew!