MALNUTRITION: FAO man on mission to swap chicken wings for insects diet

Serge Verniau is a man with a mission: to persuade the world to swap the chicken wings and steaks on their plates for crickets, palm weevils and other insects rich in protein and vitamins.




Verniau, the Laos representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), is only half-joking when he says his dream is “to feed the big metropolises from Tokyo to Los Angeles, via Paris” with the small arthropods.
He plans to present the lessons drawn from a pilot project to the world at a conference on edible insects, probably in 2012.
“Most of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Trying to feed the whole planet enough protein from cows won’t work,” Verniau told AFP.
It is not by chance that the dream was born in landlocked Laos, one of the world’s poorest countries.
Almost one quarter of its population of six million people, and nearly 40 per cent of children below the age of five, suffer from malnutrition, according to figures from the Laos government.
The typical rice-based diet provides insufficient nutrients for development — a shortfall that could be filled by insects, highly rich in protein and vitamins.
Eaten as snacks, grilled or fried, they are already part of Laos cuisine, but most people do not know how to breed them, said Oudom Phonekhampheng, dean of the faculty of agriculture at the National University of Laos.

Different food
“They just take them in the wild and eat them, and then it is finished and destroyed. They have to think about the future,” he said.
In a modest building in the suburbs of the capital, his department’s laboratory collects scientific data on this new area of breeding.

Along with house crickets — which are already widely farmed in neighbouring Thailand — there are experiments in breeding mealworms, palm weevils and weaver ants, which are appreciated for their larvae.
The students are trying out different foods for the insects in an attempt to reduce costs while maintaining quality, explains Yupa Hanboonsong, a Thai entomologist supervising the project for the FAO.
Up to now, the roughly 20 cricket farms operating in Laos have used chicken feed, like thousands of Thai farms, but it is expensive and must be imported.
Vegetables or waste left over from the production of the national beer, BeerLao, could be one solution, said Yupa, who hopes to “train the whole country”.
Beyond the fight against malnutrition, this new economic activity can also generate revenue for farmers, added Yupa.


Farming insects
Phouthone Sinthiphanya, 61, seized the opportunity in 2007 to supplement his meagre pension after a career in the tobacco industry.
The 27 cylindrical concrete vats, about 50cm (20 inches) tall, installed in the garden of his house in Vientiane produce 67kg (148 pounds) of crickets every two months, he explains.
One kilo of live insects fetches Sh628.80 ($7.5 dollars). The same quantity crushed sells for Sh524 ($6.25).
“I worked for a tobacco company and then retired. My pension was not enough so I started farming insects,” he said.
“Our customers are restaurants, villagers, markets,” he said, adding that breeding the small creatures was “easy”.
It requires little space or natural resources and only their singing might annoy the neighbours.
“Insect farming creates less damage to the environment. It is a green protein,” said Yupa.
Proponents believe such nutritional and environmental advantages could be beneficial beyond Laos, particularly in other developing countries where people are used to eating cicadas and grasshoppers.

“You can make powder from crickets that is very rich in protein. It’s low in fat and it can be added to biscuits in problem areas where food rations are distributed,” said Verniau.
Nor has he given up hope of persuading sceptics in the West.
“When you look closely, a grey shrimp or a cricket, it has the same appeal,” he joked.
http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/FAO+man+on+mission+to+swap+chicken+wings+for+insects+diet/-/539444/1151172/-/item/0/-/kqsp27/-/index.html

MALNUTRITION: Eating insects 'could cut greenhouse gas emissions'

Benjamin Kolb: 17 January 2011
 Eating insects is common in many parts of the world: Flickr/katesheets

Dining on crickets, locusts, or even cockroaches, instead of cattle or pigs, could ease both food insecurity and climate change, according to researchers.
Insects caught in the wild are already eaten widely in the developing world. Now a study says that farming them on a large scale for food would damage the environment far less than equivalent livestock production.
Scientists compared emissions, by livestock and by insects, of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, which have a greater warming effect than carbon dioxide. They also measured ammonia production, which harms the environment by acidifying soil and water.
They reared mealworms, locusts and crickets, all of which are consumed around the world, as well as sun beetles and cockroaches, which people do not eat, despite their potential as a protein source, while monitoring the amount of gas produced per kilogram of insect growth.
Compared to cattle, weight for weight, insects emitted 80 times less methane — a gas with 25 times more impact on global temperature levels than carbon dioxide.
And crickets produced 8–12 times less ammonia than pigs.
According to the study's lead author, Dennis Oonincx, an entomologist from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, 80 per cent of the world's population eats insects, particularly in the developing world.
"It's a normal part of the menu there," said Oonincx. "If you look at the mopane ['worm' or edible caterpillar] industry in Africa, it's a million dollar business."
Most of these insects are harvested live in the wild, so collection is subject to seasonal variation — they are only farmed in a few countries, he said.
Arnold van Huis, the paper's co-author and professor of tropical entomology at Wageningen University, helped formulate the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) policy on edible insects.
He said they are an "excellent food source ... that should be nurtured" and taken up as an alternative to cattle.
"I don't think we can continue eating beef like we did in the past and the FAO has already predicted that in 2050 it will become so expensive no-one [will be able to] pay for it any more."
In Kenya, Monica Ayieko, a family and consumer economist at Maseno University, is studying insect production but said the 'Westernisation' of diets could pose an obstacle to encouraging consumption.
A spokesperson for the International Livestock Research Institute, in Kenya, which published a paper last year on improving the carbon efficiency of cattle farming, said that it recognises the value of widening the use of nutritious insects in poor communities. But "no one solution — livestock or otherwise — is going to provide sufficient food and do so sustainably".
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/eating-insects-could-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions-.html