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Traditional Foods in Fight Against Hunger |
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By Francesca Colombo*
Farmers
argue that amaranth, quinoa and sorghum are crucial crops for achieving
food security.
TURIN, Italy - Hunger affects 846 million people
around the globe, and 35 countries suffer food insecurity due to
shortages, internal disorder or adverse climate. Part of the solution
to these problems lies in traditional resources and practices, according
to the 5,000 representatives of world ''food communities'' gathered
in Italy.
At the Terra Madre world meeting, held Oct. 20-23 in the northern
Italian city of Turin, there were farmers from as far as the Philippines,
as close as Italy, representatives of the African Masai ethnic group,
and many others, drawn together by the ideal of creating a sustainable
economy that is capable of resolving the global food problem.
''We can cooperate amongst ourselves and make proposals to governments
for confronting the globalization process that forced us to cut
prices. We are among the leading producers of rice in the world,
but we sell at 30 cents on the dollar per kilo,'' Nguyen Van Vinh,
from the Vietnamese biological rice growing community Hai Phong,
told Tierramérica.
In that community, in northeast Vietnam, around 100 families introduce
ducklings into the rice paddies to control insects. The duck droppings
in turn serve as fertilizer. The farmers say there is no need to
use farm chemicals on their rice crops.
The participants in the ''World Meeting of Food Communities'', sponsored
by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), advocated
for wider consumption of highly nutritious cereals like amaranth
(Amaranthus caudatus), quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa, also known as
Inca wheat), and sorghum (Sorghum vulgare), which are resistant
to extreme climate and disease.
The problem is that ''young people prefer junk food like fried potatoes
and hamburgers, and they reject traditional dishes,'' says Dutta
Mita, representative from Bankura, a rice, maize and sugarcane farming
community in West Bengala (northeast), India.
''They want to copy the U.S. lifestyle they see in movies, and the
food producers end up selling that type of food,'' Mita adds.
Furthermore, the FAO Global Information and Early Warning System
has recorded a decline in the global reserves of grains, standing
at 229.7 million tons annually.
Food production is affected by several factors, such as civil war,
plagues and extreme climate phenomena in Africa, humanitarian crises
in North Korea, Iraq and Sri Lanka, or shortages, as in Haiti and
the Dominican Republic.
According to the Terra Madre meeting participants, it is essential
to diversify eating habits and to keep in mind that eating the meat
of the llama in Bolivia, the bison in Canada or the reindeer in
Sweden, Finland, Russia and Norway, is a more sustainable practice
than eating chicken or beef, Blind Ingemas, a reindeer meat producer,
told Tierramérica.
Reindeer is a traditional food of the Sami (Laplanders) of the northern
Scandinavian coasts, where winter lasts 200 days, with temperatures
plummeting to 30 degrees below zero Celsius.
A study of the eastern Thai provinces of Kalasin, Yasothorn, Ro-iet,
Khon-Kaen and Surin found more than 100 varieties of rice, of which
only 50 are currently being cultivated, some for consumption of
the rice grain itself, others for making crackers, noodles, wines
and liquors.
''We are small and poor communities. We grow rice for our survival
and some to sell on the market. We don't compete with conventional
products, we are only trying to do the best possible. We take care
of the environment and we don't use chemical products,'' Avaiporn
Suthonthanyakon, a Thai farmer of traditional rice varieties, told
Tierramérica.
At the other end of the chain of food production are the cooks,
and some were also present for the Turin gathering.
''We distribute traditional recipes from the pre-Columbus era, like
'locro' (a stew of corn, beans and meat), tamales (shredded meat
wrapped in corn dough), 'humitas' (thick corn sauce in corn leaves),
and autochthonous products like maize and Andean potatoes,'' Argentine
Alejandra García, a chef of traditional foods, said in a Tierramérica
interview.
''All of this gets lost because of globalization, and the idea is
that we should cook as if we were in the house of our grandmothers,''
she said.
* Francesca Colombo is a Tierramérica contributor.
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