SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Gov­ern­ments across the world are be­ing ad­vised to in­ject more mon­ey in re­search of wild-type crops that can be re­silient with the grow­ing ef­fects of cli­mate change.

The ad­vice came from Prof Samuel My­ers, a prin­ci­pal re­search sci­en­tist in plan­e­tary health ex­po­sure, epi­demi­ol­o­gy and risk pro­gramme at the Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, Cen­tre for the En­vi­ron­ment.

My­ers al­so saw no prob­lem in hu­mans con­sum­ing in­sects, which has nu­tri­tion­al ben­e­fits and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly pos­i­tive.

He was speak­ing yes­ter­day at a Caribbean Plan­e­tary Health Con­fer­ence un­der the theme “Build­ing Re­silient Health Sys­tem for Cli­mate Change” at the Uni­verisi­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine, cam­pus.

The con­fer­ence hinged about plan­e­tary health and how it im­pacts Caribbean health.

Among the speak­ers were Prof Jonathan Patz from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Win­scon­sin-Madi­son and Dr Jonathan Drewry who works with the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion.

Dur­ing a ques­tion and an­swer seg­ment, an at­tendee asked the pan­el if any re­search had been done to cul­ti­vate crops that are more re­silient to cli­mate change and if they had un­der­tak­en stud­ies with re­gards the nu­tri­tion­al ben­e­fits of eat­ing in­sects.

My­ers said there are thou­sands of food crops that coun­tries are not tak­ing ad­van­tage of.

“We need to step up glob­al­ly our com­mit­ment to the CGIAR (Con­sul­ta­tive Group for In­ter­na­tion­al Agri­cul­tur­al Re­search)-sys­tems that lead glob­al agri­cul­tur­al re­search. We need to be putting more mon­ey in­to agri­cul­tur­al re­search to iden­ti­fy those type of wild type crops to al­low our agri­cul­tur­al sys­tem to be more re­silient to chang­ing con­di­tions.”

My­ers ad­mit­ted that in­sect con­sump­tion has been at­tract­ing at­ten­tion in some coun­tries.

He said sev­er­al in­sects are con­sumed in many parts of the world as a del­i­ca­cy.

One way in­sects can be eat­en was by grind­ing in­to a pow­der form and putting it in meals.

My­ers said the biggest food com­pa­ny in Cana­da now sells “crick­et flour” as an ad­di­tive, which can be used when mak­ing bis­cuits or cook­ies.

“You don’t taste it (crick­et) but it adds a lot of nu­tri­ents. Nu­tri­tion­al­ly in­sects are very valu­able and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly pos­i­tive.”

Patz in­ter­ject­ed say­ing there are few glob­al sta­ple crops hu­mans re­ly on.

In the US, he said the Gov­ern­ment spend mil­lions of dol­lars grow­ing corn and grains but “noth­ing on fruits and veg­eta­bles.”

He said gov­ern­ments need to change their in­vest­ments on health­i­er foods.

Patz cit­ed Zam­bia which is de­pen­dent on maize for their sur­vival.

“If you were to sup­ple­ment that (maize) with roast­ed meal­worms that are high in ly­sine. There is a pro­tein de­fi­cien­cy in Zam­bia...they are ly­sine de­plet­ed. They are lack­ing in ly­sine be­cause they just eat corn all the time. So there are places where in­sects can re­al­ly (have ben­e­fits)as far as nu­tri­tion is con­cerned.”

How­ev­er, Patz said we don’t have to eat in­sects every day and rec­om­mend­ed that it was bet­ter to stick to a plant-based di­et.

“In­sects, we are do­ing re­search on them and they can have huge ben­e­fits not on­ly as far as amino ben­e­fits pro­file but al­so in fi­bre. We are do­ing ex­per­i­ments where we are feed­ing stu­dents crick­et muffins and look­ing at their stool sam­ples and find­ing ben­e­fi­cial bac­te­ria in them. So there are mul­ti­ple ben­e­fits from eat­ing in­sects.”

In­stead of feed­ing live­stock grains, Pat­sz said they can con­sume black sol­dier flies which is high in pro­tein.

“There are lots of ways we can im­prove our food pro­duc­tion,” Patz said.

The flies’ lar­vae are re­port­ed to be high in pro­tein.