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High food prices and PLWHA

You’ll remember that I recently bewailed the lack of studies documenting and promoting the use of agrobiodiversity in coping with HIV. But Peace Nganwa, an intern at the African Centre for Food Security, University of KwaZulu-Natal, must have access to some relevant data on this because she suggests that recent food price increases have resulted in reduced dietary diversity, among other things:

In the face of these price hikes, households and communities have to adopt coping strategies to enable them to survive. Some of these coping strategies include: change in diet such as reduced food intake, lower food quality and reduced dietary diversity; seeking wage employment; temporary or in the worst case permanent migration; sale of productive and non-productive assets; and withdrawal of children from school.

In a very cogent article at AllAfrica.com she describes why good nutrition is particularly important to those living with HIV.

Firstly the infection-illness period, which on average is about eight years, can be extended by a good diet, among other things. People infected by the virus have up to 50 per cent more energy requirements (100 per cent for children) than people who are not infected. Secondly good nutrition both in quality and quantity is vital in the prevention of opportunistic infections which occur because of reduced body immunity. A sound diet may therefore prolong life; more especially delay the progression of HIV to AIDS. Thirdly adequate nutrition is of utmost importance to the patients on anti-retroviral therapy. Some drugs must be taken with food and most are not effective if the patients are malnourished.

I just don’t get why there seem to be so few studies and interventions out there trying to help PLWHA by promoting diverse crops for diverse diets, especially in urban settings. Tell me I’m wrong. Please.

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Over-utilized crops?

Thinking about biofortification, I imagined a world that relies on fewer and fewer over-utilized crops. When will 95% of our food come from two or three of them? Perhaps a maize-arabidobsis hybrid, a cassava wunderroot, and super-rice? Shouldn’t we rather buck that trend and diversify agriculture? That message comes from several corners, like this one: “a food system that is good for us, our communities and the planet is small-scale, diversified agriculture.”

I checked 1 the FAO statistics to see how bad things are going. How quickly are we un-diversifying agriculture? If you consider the fraction of crop land planted to different crops, it appears that — at the global scale — the opposite of what I expected is happening. Between 1961 and 2007, maize and soybean area went up, but that was countered by the decline in the area planted with wheat and barley. 2 It is a story of both winners and losers, and — overall — an increase in diversity.

Global crop diversity, expressed as the relative amount of land planted to different crops, did not change much between 1961 and 1980, but is has increased since. Between 1980 and 2007, the Shannon index of diversity went up from 3.14 to 3.34.

Do tell me why I am wrong. Is it a matter of scale? Global level diversification of crops while these crops are increasingly geographically concentrated? Could be. Is the diversity index too sensitive to the relative decline in wheat? Perhaps. Or are we really in a phase of (re-) diversification, at least in terms of the relative amount of land planted to different crop species? 3 I cannot dismiss that possibility. For example, I have heard several people speak about on-going diversification (away from rice) in India and China. Has anyone looked at this, and related global consumption patterns, in detail?

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Aren’t steroids illegal?

Karl, from Inoculated Mind, describes Nature magazine’s selection of plant scientist Richard Sayre (as one of five crop scientists who could change the world) as “a good pick.” Sayre’s pet project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is to build a super cassava; 500 g will contain the daily requirements of protein, vitamin A and E, iron and zinc. Karl describes BioCassava Plus as “like golden rice on steroids.” And I guess whether you think that’s a good thing or not depends on what you think of Golden Rice and what you think of steroids.

We’ve crossed swords on Golden Rice before now; I’m not going to go there. I’ll just repeat that I remain unconvinced that Golden Rice will measurably increase the nutritional health of people outside the mostly urban market economy, and that if they were to increase their vitamin A precursor intake with other foods it would, in my view, deliver greater total good.

I’ve made my thoughts on super cassava known too. And again, I repeat the fundamental question; when you have engineered one variety of cassava and planted it across Africa, how are you going to respond when the entire population falls prey to a newly virulent form of some disease?

The answer to nutritional deficiencies is not a super variety of any staple. It is diversity. People in the cities might be able to afford super-staples, and the farmers supplying it might do OK. But they will not help poor farmers either to earn a living or to improve their own nutrition.

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Food crisis almost over, people starving as usual

Agriculture related press releases continue to start with a sentences like “The current crisis in world food prices…”. Take these three of yesterday’s posts on this blog: the above quote is from the article discussed in Great Expectations; we need induced mutations because: “The global nature of the food crisis is unprecedented”; and it is also a reason to go forth and grow halophytes: “There’s a real urgency to addressing the issue of rising food and fuel prices.”

Haven’t they noticed that the crisis is (almost) over? Supply is up and speculators are retracting. The first stories about complaining farmers are coming in. Perhaps I am missing the point of the long term trend of dearer oil (fertilizer) and climate change?

Either way, in a couple of months we’ll be back to business as usual. Cheap food, and,

every day, almost 16,000 children that die from hunger-related causes — one child every five seconds.