World Vegetable Centre Director General Dyno Keatinge has a lot on his plate. Here, he talks vegetable outreach programs in Micronesia, genetic modification for the developing world and the much-maligned Brussels sprout. How many vegetables do you eat a day? The recommended five? Well, as far as the World Vegetable Center is concerned, it's not so much the number of vegetables you should be concerned about, as the variety. The Taiwan-based organization is dedicated to promoting vegetables' consumption – especially as a means to alleviating poverty in developing countries. The center's director general, Dyno Keating, droppped in on Deutsche Welle during a speaking tour in Europe.Deutsche Welle: More than a billion people are malnourished in the world at the moment, how do you think vegetables can help decrease poverty and malnutrition?There's certainly about a billion undernourished people, there's probably two billion overnourished people, and both of those need attention, and that attention can come from allowing people to grow a wider range of vegetables, to make those cheaper and more available in the market.
(Vegetables are) a principal source of vitamins, and many of the minerals and antioxidants that we require for good health. I would have said that we're probably underfunding vegetable research and development by a hundred-fold at the moment.
Why should more research should be done on vegetables?I believe that it's necessary to do this because we don't understand well how the nutrients in vegetables are converted into human nutrition, we don't quite understand the implications of what cooking does to vegetables, and certainly we have a problem of diseases, insects and viruses that are constantly mutating and this is something that we have to have an adequate defence for in the future.
People have been harvesting vegetables for thousands of years. Are they simply not eating the right vegetables, or do they have the wrong species or the wrong farming methods?I believe that vegetables as we see them in the supermarket today tend to have much of the nutrition bred out of them, we have lots and lots of different species which can be employed, particularly indigenous vegetables, which are much more nutritious. For example many of the green leafy African vegetables are filled with vitamin A and vitamin C, but at the moment, only the World Vegetable Center is working on their improvement. The private sector ignores these because they're not hybrids.
You mentioned indigenous vegetables, do you think that some of these indigenous vegetables that are used in some regions of the world could be introduced elsewhere, to improve people's diets? I'm absolutely certain of it. African eggplant for example is now one of the biggest money-earners of people in Tanzania, and I believe that it could be introduced for example into the south-Pacific islands, where they're very short of vegetable diversity, but would like that type of vegetable.
The difficulty is in getting good quality seed, and the World Vegetable Center is responsible for trying to help generate that and the industries around it. We will be trying to introduce those types of seeds into islands like Samoa, Tonga and others where vegetable diversity is a problem and they're also suffering from type two diabetes to a large extent as a result of obesity from bad diets.
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