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Elizabeth Payne: Quinoa could be good for poor farmers

Go ahead and eat quinoa; Angst about the rising cost of the faddish Andean superfood is misplaced In a modern tale of food fad-ism, geopolitics and trade, quinoa — a once-obscure Andean seed crop with a hard-to-pronounce name (KEEN-wah) — is quickly

Go ahead and eat quinoa; Angst about the rising cost of the faddish Andean superfood is misplaced

In a modern tale of food fad-ism, geopolitics and trade, quinoa — a once-obscure Andean seed crop with a hard-to-pronounce name (KEEN-wah) — is quickly morphing from the darling of nutritionists and foodies into an ethical conundrum on a plate. But it shouldn’t be.

A growing chorus of voices is worrying that the very crop that long sustained poor Bolivians and Peruvians now has the potential to harm them because of its massive popularity around the world and rising price, leaving them to turn to less nutritious, cheaper foods.

“The more you love quinoa, the more you hurt Peruvians and Bolivians,” declared a Globe and Mail headline recently. Articles in the Guardian and the New York Times have also reported on concerns that the hunger for quinoa in developed countries has put it out of the reach of the very people who have eaten it for centuries.

“If fact, the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there. It’s beginning to look like a cautionary tale of how a focus on exporting premium foods can damage the producer country’s food security,” wrote Joanna Blythman in the Guardian.

But wait. Maybe we can still enjoy our quinoa and hold the guilt. In fact, the rise of quinoa is a great opportunity for Bolivian and Peruvian farmers. They have a crop that is increasingly valuable and that is best suited to their climates.

They have succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams to find hungry export markets. Of course that means it costs more, but that means more money for them, which is a better way to improve their health and prospects in the long term than simply a steady diet of quinoa and poverty. And they should be able to have both quinoa and more money, in fact. The Bolivian government has introduced measures to try to raise the domestic consumption of quinoa.

Not only is quinoa good for you — ridiculously good, in fact — but it is good for the economic fortunes of farmers and others in Bolivia and Peru where most of it is grown, parts of the world that could use some help. As a bonus, it represents a rare South American resource export that is sustainable in the long term, if managed properly, unlike the resources that are dug or drilled out of the ground. There’s a worthwhile development initiative for Canadians and others, if the countries in question need the help: agricultural assistance to ensure quinoa, the goose that is laying golden eggs for South American farmers right now, is farmed smartly and managed in a way that keeps the goose alive. Among other things, that means supporting diverse crops rather than just quinoa.

Quinoa is on the radar this year, in part, because the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa (yes, really), saying it has the potential to advance food security around the globe and prevent malnutrition.

It has been credited with helping to prevent or reduce everything from osteoporosis to celiac disease, even some forms of cancer. A paper written for NASA in 1993 declared it “as close as any other [food] in the plant or animal kingdom” to supplying all the essential life-sustaining nutrients. Vegetarians love it.

And then there is the UN declaration which, among other things, sees quinoa as a key to reaching millennium development goals by playing “a more important role in feeding a hungry world.”

The Guardian’s Blythman is right that quinoa is complicated, most notably because of the seeming incompatibility between it fulfilling the UN’s mandate to feed the world’s hungry and becoming a luxury product gobbled up by nutrition-crazed western urbanites. She is also right to point out that seemingly healthy, even ethical, food choices can often have negative unintended consequences (she uses the example of water-sucking asparagus crops in Peru and the forests ravaged to make way for ever-more-in-demand soya crops). Nothing is without consequences.

But that doesn’t make the miracle grain of the Andes a bad seed. Pick up your fork.