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For most conferences, once the attendees head home the action is over. There isn’t much collaboration or communication until the next conference. Happily, this isn’t the case for the Global Conference on Biofortification. Check out the conference blog for an opportunity to share your ideas on the “Proposed Framework for Biofortification“. Just leave a reply on the blog no later than December 15. Continue reading… 
The take home message, for me, is that there are people in dire need that deserve better, and improved nutrition is the key to solving many problems. As Mark Whalqvist said in a symposium about “Weaving biofortification into the global development agenda”, good nutrition is not really about rights. It’s about equity, fairness. A child growing up in rural India or Uganda deserves a chance for healthy brain and body development just as much as a child growing up in Washington, DC or Ames, Iowa. It’s only fair. In a few moments, talks at the First Global Conference on Biofortification will begin. Up first: the keynote address The Future of Food by William J. Garvelink, the US Government Deputy Coordinator for Development Feed the Future: Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. Then, a panel discussion on the Importance of agriculture for addressing malnutrition. If you have any questions regarding biofortification, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to find the answer and address it in a later post. Follow the conference on Twitter #biofortconf.
Even before the talks get started, the posters here display some exciting research. For example, B.B. Singh, an agronomist who splits his time between Texas A&M and an Indian university, has developed 60 day cowpea.
Continue reading… Back in February, Frank & I went to the MOSES Organic Farming Conference, and while Frank was quick to put up his pictures, and I got one video up, I’ve been a bit lax in getting the rest of the material up and annotated. While discussing genetic engineering over at Grist, Doug Gurian-Sherman from the Union of Concerned Scientist popped in to say a big hello and a response to my comment. One of |
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Looking at all of the notes I’ve taken at the 
Goals for nutrition
Over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, Jeremy has been critical of information coming out of the First Global Conference on Biofortification. He wonders if the organizers and attendees were/are too focused on a techno-fix rather than on diverse diets as a solution. This being a conference on biofortification, we talked about biofortification a lot, and it could be argued that biofortification is a techno-fix, whether by breeding or biotechnology.
However, we talked about a lot more at the conference, including supplementation and fortification, diverse diets and education, cooking and farming methods. To say that diverse diets were ignored would be incorrect. That obviously isn’t getting through in the materials coming out of the conference through the organizers or media, which is a problem.
If we polled each conference attendee, I think most if not all would say that a diverse diet for every human on the planet is the ultimate goal. Many of the sessions addressed this specifically, getting into the details of how diet and nutrition are intertwined. Here are just three examples:
Continue reading…