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Banned
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It is well established that Malawi is a mess, and foreign interference, no matter how well intentioned, is a major factor:
Quote:
http://www.eufic.org/web/article.asp...d=16&artid=103
The origins of maize: the puzzle of pellagra
30_3_bigThe spread of maize as a staple food from the fifteenth century resulted in a devastating nutrient-deficiency disease called pellagra. The causation of pellagra posed a medical puzzle for centuries until twentieth century scientists unravelled the mystery.
The spread of maize
Columbus discovered maize in the New World in 1492 and brought it back to Spain, from where it spread throughout Europe, to North Africa, the Middle East, India and China. Maize (Zea mays, or corn as it is known in some countries) is the only cereal crop that has an American origin and which is now a principal cereal crop in tropical and subtropical regions throughout the world. The increasing use of maize as a staple food reflected the much higher yields per hectare, compared with wheat, rye and barley. Because maize was cheap, it became the dominant food and main source of dietary energy and protein for poor people, particularly those in rural and underprivileged segments of society.
Pellagra or "the sour skin" disease
Unfortunately, wherever maize went, a disease called "pellagra" was sure to follow. The connection between maize and pellagra was first described by Casal in Spain in 1735.When it became an endemic disease in northern Italy, Francesco Frapoli of Milan named it 'pelle agra" (pelle, skin; agra, sour). Clinically, the disease is identified by the three Ds-dermatitis, diarrhoea and dementia-and if untreated, pellagra typically leads to death in four or five years.
For years, the lack of medical knowledge and the earlier suspicion that pellagra was caused by some hypothetical toxin in maize, or as a result of infectious agents or a genetic condition, led to major pellagra epidemics in Europe and the United States.
The puzzle started to be solved when it was noted that pellagra was rare in Mexico despite widespread consumption of maize. The reason appeared to lay in the different way in which the grain was prepared in Mexico.
The people of the Aztec and Mayan civilisations softened the corn to make it edible with an alkaline solution-limewater. This process liberated the bound niacin (also known as niacytin) and the important amino acid tryptophan, from which niacin can be formed, making both "bioavailable" for digestion.
The ancient practice of soaking the maize meal overnight in lime water before making tortillas was never transferred to those countries in the Old World to which maize travelled or to communities subsisting largely on maize as a staple food. This almost invariably led to the niacin deficiency disease, pellagra.
The knowledge of the chemistry of this process ultimately explained a long-standing nutritional puzzle. Much of the credit for demonstrating that pellagra is a nutrient deficiency disease belongs to Goldberger and his colleagues, who between 1913 and 1930 proved that the disease in humans and 'black-tongue' (a niacin-deficiency disease in dogs) could be cured by the pellagra-preventing (P-P) factors nicotinic acid and niacin....
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Quote:
http://www.biotech-info.net/divided_over_diet.html
"Divided over a diet for the poor: SCIENCE MALNUTRITION"
Michela Wrong
Financial Times (London)
September 8, 2000
Aid workers in Africa are familiar with the sight: children with orange-tinted hair and distended bellies, lying listless in villages seemingly blessed with abundant food.
Victims of malnutrition rather than hunger, the children are dying because they have been weaned early from their mother's milk and placed on gruel diets that lack the protein needed to build muscle and bone.
So when scientists came up with a maize variety that boasted higher levels of essential amino acids - a maize, incidentally, that was produced by conventional breeding, not genetic engineering - you might have expected universal rejoicing.
But while the two researchers who played a large role developing Quality Protein Maize, known as QPM, were yesterday named winners of this year's World Food Prize, some promoters of economic development in poor countries regard the breakthrough with something bordering on suspicion.
Their caution sheds light on why the debate over the rights and wrong of genetically modified crops has become so heated. Wrapped up within the anti-GM stance adopted by environmental groups and development agencies are issues unconnected to fears of horizontal gene-transfer or pollen contamination.
Rather, they concern what are perceived as top-down approaches, or "technofixes", and they date further back than the recent furore over genetic engineering - back, indeed, to the Green Revolution itself.
"GM has become a lightning rod for other worries about agro-industrial complexes, corporate control and the undermining of local knowledge," says Professor Jules Pretty, an agricultural specialist at the University of Essex. "A lot of these concerns are not directly related to GM, but they are being expressed in that form."
Many of these issues got a recent public airing with the invention of Golden Rice, which was genetically engineered to contain beta-carotene, a yellow compound that the body converts into vitamin A. Its nutritional absence kills or blinds millions each year.
Although QPM comes free of the GM tag - a label that raises the prospect of regulatory hurdles and legal wrangling over intellectual property rights - it shares several charac- teristics with Golden Rice.
The maize traces its roots back to the 1960s, when a PhD student at Purdue University in the US discovered that two maize varieties from the Andean highlands, characterised by opaque kernels, contained large amounts of the amino acids lysine and tryptophan.
Traced to the gene opaque-2, the improved protein quotient was seized on as a weapon against kwashiorkor, a condition which distends the belly, and marasmus, a wasting disease.
But initial enthusiasm was short-lived. In the field, opaque-2's yields were 20 per cent lower than those of conventional varieties. The maize was soft and chalky, making it susceptible to insects and viruses. Kernels rotted in storage.....
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Quote:
http://knowledge.cta.int/en/content/view/full/2938
Malawi - GM sorghum project to train local scientists
Nation Online (Malawi) 20 April 2006 | A window of opportunity has opened for local agricultural scientists to learn new tricks of fortifying sorghum, thanks to US philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates who are bankrolling the project. Known as the African Biotechnology Sorghum (ABS), the project is worth US$450 million (about K60 billion), which the Gates couple is pumping through the Gates Foundation. The sorghum initiative is drawing its funding from the foundation’s Grand Challenges for Global Health (GCGH), which seeks to harness the power of science and technology in improving the health of the world’s poorest people.
22/05/2006 ....
http://www.pronutrition.org/archive/200306/msg00009.php
Everyone Can Live Longer and Stronger with Good Nutrition!
HIV/AIDS Best Practices Workshop, 2002
By Stacia M. Nordin, RD, HIV/AIDS Crisis Corps Coordinator US Peace Corps PO Box 208, Lilongwe, tel: 757-657/157, fax: 751-008,
snordin@mw.peacecorps.gov
Nutrition & HIV
.....Planning meals with the Food Groups
The current meal in Malawi consists of a lot of nsima (made with white maize flour) along with a little bit of ndiwo side dish. This meal is eaten over and over again every day, every meal. This eating pattern ('diet') is not helping to boost the immune system because people are eating too much from the Staple group and not enough of the other food groups. This diet provides very few nutrients for the body and leaves the body weak and vulnerable to diseases. In addition, the way the foods are prepared removes most of the nutrients through processing or cooking before the food gets inside our bodies. Another problem in towns is that people tend to eat too much from the Fats and the Animal Foods groups which is also not a healthy diet.
A better meal consists of foods from each of the 6 food groups and uses
different foods for different meals, while processing ad cooking the food to retain the most nutrients. Most people in Malawi (and around the world) need to include more foods from the Vegetables, Fruits, and Legumes & Nuts
Food Groups, which is where we get most of our vitamins that are responsible for fighting diseases. A better meal also means eating less maize and instead including a variety of different Staple foods. This picture shows the proportions of each of the food groups that should be covering our plates - each person is different, but something close to this would be sufficient.
Remember, a wide variety is the key!
Getting the Foods for a Better Diet: What Can We Do?
In order to eat a better diet, we have to start thinking about what we are
doing with our environment. <h3>The emphasis in Malawi for about the last 100 years has been on maize, a crop which is not even native to the culture.
Before maize, Malawi's environment and diet revolved around a wide variety of local fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, millets, sorghums, other seeds, roots, and various animal foods. The landscape has been converted from a healthy variety of trees, plants, and animals, to one that is merely covered in maize fields. The diversity in the environment is gone so the diversity in our diets is gone, leaving both the environment and the human population unhealthy and at risk for disease.
Although many of the traditional foods are still available, they are
vanishing quickly because of the push to supply maize year-round either by forcing the land to produce it or by bringing in maize aid when the
environment is unable to meet our maize demands. Maize is not the only
culprit, people are becoming more interested in obtaining foreign foods than in giving attention to the abundance of foods right around them.
Expatriates, donors, and aid organizations who come in to 'help' often never take the time to learn about these valuable food resources that are already here.
The local foods that are being crowded out by maize and other foreign foods are often higher in nutrients than foreign foods, can be available with little work, outside inputs, or money, and are delicious!</h3> There are over 500 foods available in Malawi that are able to meet all our nutritional
needs and many people and organizations are trying to revive the knowledge and use of these plants as part of the diet. People are collecting and sharing local seeds and intercropping them in their gardens; focusing on purchasing locally available foods from vendors; capturing and utilizing excess water to reuse for growing local foods and medicines; caring for the soil through reuse of all organic wastes; wisely using all areas around their homes for food production; preparing foods through methods which retain the most nutrients; and changing their diets to include a variety of foods.
Anyone, anywhere around the world can implement these ideas in their lives and contribute to a more sustainable and healthy world....
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Last edited by host; 12-02-2007 at 08:37 AM..
Reason: To remove my "whining"
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