Micro-livestock for Congo

 AP reports on the possibility of combating hunger in the DRC by using a smaller breed of livestock. They breed quickly, they can be hidden or carried around in the event of an attack, they have fewer diseases than most, and they taste like dark chicken! Researchers only thought of it because the people are already starting to do it themselves.

Move over, micro-finance. Micro-livestock is on the way!

(Hat tip: Poverty News Blog)

Micro-livestock part 5: Hookworm

By far the smallest micro-livestock opportunity blogged about yet (meant to blog about it last May, anyway). A fellow named Jasper Lawrence heard that being infected with hookworm could be a cure for asthma or allergies, from which he suffered. So he went to Africa and got himself infected by tiptoeing through the feces barefoot. And his sinuses cleared up.

Now he's trying to sell hookworm to others similarly plagued by allergies. In the sequel, of course, the FDA has decided that it doesn't ... um, think he filed the right paperwork. Yeah, that's it. So he's fled to the tropics to spread the love.

Micro-livestock part 2

Let's face it: even guinea pigs may be too big. The FAO is looking at creative sources of protein to feed the world's population and have hit on ... INSECTS.

Insects are more than four times more efficient at converting food into weight than cattle and you only need 100 grams of caterpillars to get your daily protein, iron, B vitamins, and more. An article entitled "For More Protein, Filet of Cricket" in this week's Science mentions as possible candidates the mopane (mo-PAN-ee) worm of southern Africa, and Mexican grasshoppers as possibly breedable. FAO will soon be encouraging countries to include insect consumption in their national food balance sheets and food security plans.

Best quote from the FAO: "some [advisers] get their insecticides ready, and others get their chopsticks."

Of course, the thought of eating insects brings only one movie to mind: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There were some classic, unforgettable, alternative-meat moments there.

What are your favorite alternative-meat moments?

Big Bag o Blog Links to start the new year

China in Africa meets Micro-livestock: a new research program is introducing Chinese weaver ants to African fruit trees to combat pests. The researchers note that if this works, it is: green and organic, another source of income and jobs (rearing ants to sell farmers), and a viable protein source for people who don't mind eating ants.

Half of a charter city: Dijbouti, Ethiopia. The charter city part comes at the end of a lengthy musing on Ethiopian political history, wondering why democracy has taken so little hold.

A policy entrepreneur in India is using Facebook to increasing citizen access to government (ie - complain here) and improve information sharing between government sectors.

GMOs meet Florida orange juice to prevent an insect-borne bacteria which causes "greening" that wipes out the crop and the tree. "Most scientists who have studied the problem seem to agree that genetic modification, and the cultivation of trees resistant to the bacteria that causes "greening" disease, currently hold out the only real long-term hope of fighting it." That was the conclusion of a report sponsored by the Florida Department of Citrus and U.S. National Academy of Sciences

Obama is signing the food safety bill today ... but where will the money come from?

A defense of large incomes for people in finance: "As long as we have an economy that is increasingly dominated by “idea companies,” where the idea is really, really hard to discover and really easy to implement once discovered, finance will earn huge gains." (Response to the responses)

On the gains from having a single currency in the US. To Libertarians, this is called the transaction cost side of private currency creation.

Education spending and minorities: it's easier/more cost-effective to educate a homogeneous population. Tino shows that once you remove immigrant populations from the analysis, the relationship between education spending and outcomes is large and positive. It only looks like additional spending worsens or has no effect on outcomes in the full sample because it's much more expensive to educate more diverse groups, who have lower outcomes for a variety of reasons. Within minority groups too, there is evidence of the same positive effect. The 0-effect sometimes observed is an artifact of lumping groups together.

Which shipping company is best for your package? Depends on the type of package. USPS is gentlest with packages but worst with Express Mail. All carriers were less careful with Fragile boxes.

Eating Remarkable Food: Other White Meats

Back when I’d been at this international aid thing for not very long, I made a promise to myself that food was never going to be an issue for me. Annoyed with fellow expats for whom food seemed justification for going high-maintenance, I resolved to try anything at least once. And always accept whatever a host offered. “It’ll all just turn to glucose later”, I told myself. And to this day, that has been my personal motto, while traveling, where food is concerned.

 Thus begins a fascinating tour of food duty, including:

Dog: The other white meat. Tastes a little like chicken. In fact, quite contrary to the ethnocentric assumptions of some, I’ve heard of Western people going to dog restaurants and being tricked into eating chicken disguised as dog (chicken is much cheaper), rather than the other way around.

Other tales of micro-livestock: in Bolivia, in Mexico,  in DRC.

Successes: Nutrition in Bolivia, LDS

The April Ensign reports on LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons) development assistance efforts in Bolivia. From the description in the article, the church is following a lot of best practices.

"Project leaders worked closely with local government and community leaders to decide together what needs the Church could meet and to involve the community more heavily in the projects. ... Since the funding for the programs lasts only for a limited time, the Church involved local ... leaders, physicians, health officials, and residents in hopes that the results would last."

Local leaders in El Alto identified four primary needs two years ago: remodel the hospital, train people in gardening and nutrition, train doctors in neonatal resuscitation and provide supplies for it, and wheelchairs. So the Church arranged for training of another 150 midwives in neonatal resuscitation, provided supplies for the hospital and thousands of wheelchairs, used churches for nutrition training meetings, and taught urban dwellers about square foot gardening and provided some start up seeds. Initial recipients then spread the knowledge and some seeds to neighbors who have spread the information yet further. They are also teaching urban gardening in La Paz and raising micro-livestock.

Community leaders in Suriquiña wanted to reduce malnutrition from 50 percent of children to 10 percent. At Church buildings, members of the community were taught how to build adobe block greenhouses with a goal to have each participating household set up two greenhouses: one for own consumption and one for products to sell. Now, "for the first time, [they] started growing and eating cucumbers, lettuce, beets and other healthful plants." By next year, there should be about 100 greenhouses up and some children are already showing marked improvement.

"One of our goals is to help people set their own course and solve their own problems. We're confident that with a little bit of help where needed and inspiration from the Lord, they can and will improve conditions for their families."

The Benson Institute was heavily involved in the efforts. They commented that, "The majority of the people eat only meat products and potatoes, and they really don't have any other types of foods such as vegetables, which are needed for them to receive vitamins." So they have also been teaching residents how to eat prepare and eat vegetables safely.

Residents in and out of the church are commenting on their children's improved health and abilities at school.

Additional information on the communities and efforts can be found here. Other LDS efforts worldwide include a new, free employment website with over 250,000 job listings at the moment and reports of LDS efforts and perspective in Haiti can be found here and here.

Big Bag of Agriculture, Health, and Development

At a Cornell presentation (I'm at it now and have been tweeting its notes), Duxbury argued that we are leaving a LOT of crop productivity on the table by not following pretty basic techniques and that there are still some pretty gaping holes in our knowledge. He called into question the notion of "unproductive soils" in Africa, calling the notion "fantasy." It just means we haven't figured out what the real constraints are. In several trials on the effects of adding phosphorous, there was a modest improvement on the expeirmental plot, but there was a hugely productive section in the middle of the field straddling the experimental and control plots. In more difficult solutions, he encouraged eliminating flood irrigation, improving education, better small scale machinery (where are the agricultural engineers?), more effort on grain and multipurpose legumes, more attention to year-round supply of fruits and vegetables. Farmers know what they do and why; they lack knowledge about change.

Haddad's presentation at the IFPRI Conference on "Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health" focused on how to get there. His major points were that

• we have very few impact evaluations to guide us (out of 307 studies, only one tenth even attempted an impact study);
• increasing women's participation in the process will improve the connections between ag policies and nutrition (half of studies find no difference between men and women, the other half find more male access);
• "To intertwine nutrition and agriculture, it will help to have professionals who have an appreciation for both, even if they only have expertise in one or the other. ... what we have shows some demand for nutritionists (in Norway at least) who can think outside of the nutrition box and that agriculture students in the US will not learn about international agriculture unless it forms part of their core curriculum." 

I think that first sentence is one of the best descriptions of my ideal for multi-disciplinarity: appreciating what another profession can bring to the table while grounded in a firm set of tools you can bring. Duxbury noted how the tenure process discourages inter-disciplinarity that would improve crop diversity. "I'm not in favor of multidisciplinary specialists: you don't know enough of any one."

Haddad also lists the six men being considered for the new head of FAO: