Bringing biodiversity to the plate: Nutrition education a vital ingredient

For example, a study to map the diversity, yield and socio-economic value of fruit trees in home gardens in Central Sudan, found that nutritious fruit such as the indigenous Baobab, high in vitamin C and calcium, was not even being harvested from the trees let alone sold at market. Katja Kehlenbeck, of the World Agroforestry Centre told the conference:

“While we found a rich diversity of fruit trees in home gardens, 22 species in just 36 gardens including 13 indigenous varieties, the fruit was not even harvested to eat in 14 gardens and not one farmer was selling the fruit at market even if the market price was around 11 times higher than sorghum. The trees were being kept for other reasons which were deemed more important culturally, such as spiky branches that made good fence material”.

The trees are also vulnerable to clearance, making way for mechanically cultivated fields or removed from gardens to give more exotic crops extra light. This kind of habitat destruction is also causing problems for another important source of food – insects.

If you find the thought of eating a caterpillar hard to swallow then you may be missing out on a great source of protein and fatty acids. Insects have long been considered part of the local diet in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America, with 163 species, 121 genera and 34 families considered to be food.

Muniirah Mbabazi, of the Department of Food Science and Technology, Makerere University, explained that eating insects is a culinary custom under threat in eastern and southern Africa:

“We eat insects not as part of a coping strategy against hunger and malnutrition as many people think, but because it is an integral part of our diet and cultural heritage. We eat many different kinds including moth and butterfly larvae, beetles, locusts and grasshoppers. But cultural changes, a loss of indigenous knowledge, the use of pesticides and habitat destruction are placing this freely available food supply and potential income source at risk. Many people see insects as pests and want to destroy them while younger people want to eat western style diets”

Educating younger generations about the value of traditional diets is just one important objective for nutritional and educational programmes to put biodiversity back into local food systems. Other case studies highlighted schemes to teach the best ways to process and cook food to minimize nutrient losses, sharing knowledge about how to reintroduce seeds from a genebank and changing the dietary habits of children in Nigeria.

Read more about Bioversity’s work on nutrition.