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Building Better Bananas (2012)

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Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#41

Post by tfinniga »

bildung wrote: post #14
tfinniga wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "distribution" in this context is just a nice way of saying that poor people can't afford better food from elsewhere, they have to rely on what is cheap and can be bought from the local market. If they're already buying bananas as a staple food, then I presume that the fix would be for the government to go to the local growers and either give the better banana plants for free, or at a discounted rate, or some…

> I think "distribution" in this context is just a nice way of saying that poor people can't afford better food from elsewhere, they have to rely on what is cheap and can be bought from the local market. That may very well be the case. > If they're already buying bananas as a staple food, then I presume that the fix would be for the government to go to the local growers and either give the better banana plants for fr…

> If the government has the means to do that, why is it not providing seeds/saplings etc. of vitamin A containing crops right now?

Why do people eat bananas as a staple food now? If you're poor, it's all about the efficiency of calories per dollar. You're hungry and you want something filling, but you don't have a lot to spend. You pick the thing that is going to fill you up.

If the staple food right now is the banana, it's because that's what is most efficient to produce. In other areas that is rice, in the US it is corn.

The goal is to make the staple food a bit healthier.

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#42

Post by tomcam »

elfcard wrote: post #22
ataggart wrote: post #12

Considering the opposition to golden rice (sometimes violently [1]) to fulfill this role in other parts of the world, these bananas are probably DOA. So long as middle-class Westerners imagine someone somewhere might end up making a profit, they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind [2]. [1] http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-des... [2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.…

Here is the deal, we simply haven't had the time to determine if this is safe. And anyone who says it is is lying, because that's simply impossible to tell at this point. We know that with our best intentions and cutting edge science, we created margarine, something to save the arteries of the world. Only to find out that we didn't understand the science well enough, and margarine was essentially the stuff causing th…

Is starvation more safe?

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#43

Post by chrisgd »

jjoonathan wrote: post #38
bmj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "distribution" in this context is just a nice way of saying that poor people can't afford better food from elsewhere, they have to rely on what is cheap and can be bought from the local market. Depends on location, I think. In the United States, yeah, that might be the case, but in other countries (I'm thinking parts of Africa), it is a distribution issue, particularly when dealing with corrupt governments.

I'm sure it depends on the famine, but this very issue (is famine primarily due to local inequality or local scarcity) is currently the subject of a spat between two prominent academics, Amartya Sen and Thomas Picketty, which has produced an abundance of material on the subject. FWIW Picketty seems to be much better at managing the internet battlefront, so it might be better to start with Sen's book "Poverty and Fami…

FWIW, Sen has agreed with the majority of Piketty's conclusions, though.

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#44

Post by aestra »

delluminatus wrote: post #39
aestra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golden rice treats a symptom and is not a cure. Instead of spending millions of dollars on treating symptoms I wonder if all that effort should instead be invested in finding a cure. There is an idea that biotechnology alone will solve all the world's problems without trying to understand what causes those problems. Or even understand the situation outside their own worldview. Vitamin A deficiency is rarely an isolat…

FYI, rice is an extremely healthy food, and typically it has been something that the poor are lucky to have. It also contains fat (in non-white rice). Also, what do you want people to "find a cure" for? The growing population of humans? Climate change, which will radically alter geography especially in Africa, the Middle East, and India? Wealth imbalance, which has existed since the beginning of agriculture? It's ext…

WOW. Nobody argued that rice wasn't good for you. A diet of all or mostly rice leads to nutrition deficiencies.

>in non-white rice

People eat white rice because it doesn't spoil as fast, especially in the tropics.

Education, treating poverty, and encouraging biodiversity and a varied diet among the population. Teaching things like backyard farming, hygiene, breastfeeding. Also vaccines since infection drains vitamin A deficiency and a large cause of mortality from infectious diseases is due to vitamin A deficiency.

Other problems like political instability and poverty are more difficult to find a solution to. I'll let other people study that one.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11761/

> The overall prevalence of VAD is decreasing markedly because of increased awareness of VAD as a public health problem and increased measles immunization and vitamin A supplementation or fortification programs. However, the prevalence of VAD is increasing or is unknown in some regions because of political instability, high rates of infectious disease, and increasing poverty.

http://www.cehjournal.org/article/do-vitamin-a-deficiency-an...

>Children grow and develop well when they have access to affordable, diverse, nutrient-rich food, appropriate maternal and child care, adequate health services and a healthy environment including safe water, sanitation and good hygiene.

>Underlying these causes are factors such as household food insecurity (due to poverty or other reasons), inadequate care and feeding practices, unhealthy household environments and inadequate health services

> Improving the availability of affordable, nutritious foods requires a broad approach, encompassing all the farmers, businesses, institutions and processes (such as supply chains) which produce, process and make foods available to communities.

>In the short term, vitamin A supplementation is the most effective way to reduce vitamin A deficiency and child mortality (see page 70). Doing something about vitamin A deficiency on its own, however, will not deal with the larger problem of undernutrition and deficiency of other micronutrients essential for growth, health and educational development. This is why, in this issue of the Community Eye Health Journal, we suggest that vitamin A deficiency must be addressed – not just with supplementation – but also by working with mothers to address the immediate and underlying causes of chronic undernutrition. This will improve their children’s health and diet and therefore also their general nutrition. In particular, we should encourage improved hand washing practices and work with families to overcome customs associated with inadequate complementary or weaning foods.

That being said, I don't actually believe that giving golden rice to farmers is currently a bad idea as it is already there. I just think the whole initiative was tackling the problem the wrong way. I also worry about any unintended consequences.

It isn't a popular opinion around here because there is a view that science will fix all the world's problems. Too often the societal problems that cause those problems are ignored. Even suggesting that GMOs might not be the answer we are all looking for gets you lumped in with the loonies and a flurry of downvotes.

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#45

Post by VLM »

svsaraf wrote: post #6
gus_massa wrote: post #2

> Making banana plants less susceptible to diseases is a secondary goal for us. Our primary goal is to help Dale develop new types of banana that are more nutritious – specifically, much richer in Vitamin A and Iron that the body can absorb. I don’t like some details. The banana needs a little more energy to produce more Vitamin A, so the plant will yield fewer bananas and these bananas will be more expensive. You wi…

The banana needs a little more energy to produce more Vitamin A, so the plant will yield fewer bananas and these bananas will be more expensive. While it is true the banana would use more energy, there is no evidence for lower crop yields. The banana has to take the Iron from the soil, unless it’s a very rich Iron zone, so you need to use a fertilizer to replace the Iron. This also makes the bananas more expensive. T…

Most of the time in the USA you end up with iron deficiency in soil by having it too alkaline. There's iron but the plants can't use it above pH 7 or so. Very much like dehydrating in an ocean, plenty of H2O just can't adsorb it from the seawater. So most iron problems in the USA are actually pH problems causing a lack of iron not a lack of iron itself. So most commercial "iron fertilizer" etc is something to acidify the soil and only a little actual iron sulfate.

It takes VERY little iron sulfate to provide the required iron for soil. It takes a lot of stuff to drop the pH a point or two.

If you research this you'll find that fixing iron deficiency in the USA caused by excessive use of certain fertilizers and it is REALLY EXPENSIVE and labor intensive because most of the money is blown on fixing the pH to make the plentiful existing iron available.

In the unlikely even you're low on actual iron in the soil, iron sulfate is ridiculously cheap and it doesn't take much, like a spoonful per 100 sq ft, so a $10 bag should be something like a lifetime supply for an entire village...

Also some fertilizers are good iron sources so supplementation is not necessary or even a good idea.

Given where I live banana cultivation isn't a serious issue so I don't know how bananas and their fertilizers interact WRT soil pH.

The TLDR is don't confuse soil pH repair with Fe supplementation (especially since one costs 100x more than the other) and iron may not even theoretically be a possible problem depending on local fertilization practices.

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#46

Post by jjoonathan »

chrisgd wrote: post #43
jjoonathan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it depends on the famine, but this very issue (is famine primarily due to local inequality or local scarcity) is currently the subject of a spat between two prominent academics, Amartya Sen and Thomas Picketty, which has produced an abundance of material on the subject. FWIW Picketty seems to be much better at managing the internet battlefront, so it might be better to start with Sen's book "Poverty and Fami…

FWIW, Sen has agreed with the majority of Piketty's conclusions, though.

It sounds like you're referring to a particular article I must have missed. Any chance you have a link? I've read enough vitriolic back-and-forth between these two that I'd greatly enjoy hearing them discuss what they actually agree about :)

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#47

Post by VLM »

maxerickson wrote: post #10
gus_massa wrote: post #2

> Making banana plants less susceptible to diseases is a secondary goal for us. Our primary goal is to help Dale develop new types of banana that are more nutritious – specifically, much richer in Vitamin A and Iron that the body can absorb. I don’t like some details. The banana needs a little more energy to produce more Vitamin A, so the plant will yield fewer bananas and these bananas will be more expensive. You wi…

The vitamin A prevents blindness. It has to be taking away an awful lot of calories to not end up a win.

Looking at the RDA you need probably 100 uG of vit A per banana to eliminate all chance of illness. Less would be OK, or better than nothing. More would probably be highly unwise to prevent vit A toxicity.

For the sake of argument I will make the ridiculous claim that vit A synthesis is 10000x less efficient than carbohydrate synthesis. This is absolutely laughable but I want to error on the extreme side of caution. So you trade the photosynthesis energy that could have been 1 g of banana mass for some micrograms of vit A.

A typical banana (whatever that means) weighs about a tenth of a kilo, or rephrased a bunch of ten weigh about a kilo. So a banana will weigh about 1 percent less. Bananas aren't all that calorie dense so figure a bit less than a calorie per gram.

So enough Vit A to prevent significant disease will cost much less than one calorie per banana. The numbers I chose were intentionally ridiculous worst case, so it should be far less than one gram per banana.

Some folks who have not done the research or math seem under the impression that a Vit A enhanced banana must somehow be 1/10 the size of a normal banana or something equally unlikely.

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#48

Post by dang »

ataggart wrote: post #12

Considering the opposition to golden rice (sometimes violently [1]) to fulfill this role in other parts of the world, these bananas are probably DOA. So long as middle-class Westerners imagine someone somewhere might end up making a profit, they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind [2]. [1] http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-des... [2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.…

> they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind

Please don't use inflammatory language like this when arguing on HN. It's unsubstantive (because it overstates things for agitation effect) and tends to provoke low-quality subthreads.

Here's something PG once wrote that clarifies this principle:

[HN comments] should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#49

Post by upofadown »

ataggart wrote: post #12

Considering the opposition to golden rice (sometimes violently [1]) to fulfill this role in other parts of the world, these bananas are probably DOA. So long as middle-class Westerners imagine someone somewhere might end up making a profit, they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind [2]. [1] http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-des... [2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.…

That is an entirely different part of the world with an entirely different culture and set of existing problems. It is entirely possible that "golden bananas" might actually be helpful in some African countries...

Re: Building Better Bananas (2012)

#50

Post by afarrell »

aestra wrote: post #44
delluminatus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, rice is an extremely healthy food, and typically it has been something that the poor are lucky to have. It also contains fat (in non-white rice). Also, what do you want people to "find a cure" for? The growing population of humans? Climate change, which will radically alter geography especially in Africa, the Middle East, and India? Wealth imbalance, which has existed since the beginning of agriculture? It's ext…

WOW. Nobody argued that rice wasn't good for you. A diet of all or mostly rice leads to nutrition deficiencies. >in non-white rice People eat white rice because it doesn't spoil as fast, especially in the tropics. Education, treating poverty, and encouraging biodiversity and a varied diet among the population. Teaching things like backyard farming, hygiene, breastfeeding. Also vaccines since infection drains vitamin…

I think people were reading "this is treating a symptom of larger problems" and thinking you meant "We should not be treating symptoms but should be focusing on the root cause."

This makes sense when you have only a few minds working on the problem and the root cause can be tackled directly and simply. However, there are many minds with many different specialties and the root cause is complex enough that it makes sense to divide it into individual problems. Especially since those symptoms contribute to the cause. Obesity causes joint pain and joint pain causes lack of exercise. And so it sometimes sounds silly to criticize someone for just dealing with joint pain rather than the larger problem.

But it now sounds like you are actually saying "We shouldn't forget that there are also other problems to solve here." And this is very true.

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