Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff Lauren Bogle o bamb here. Quinoa has caused quite a lot of confusion during its short tenure on the worldwide scene. Raised four thousands of years in the Andean Mountain region of South America, it's only really blown up worldwide over the past decade. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization declared the International Year of Quinoa, giving the
crop a big boost on the world stage. The declaration was intended as a way to highlight crops that were unknown and forgotten, at least to the wider world, as a way of promoting food security. But along with quinua's rapid ascent to the top of the health food chain came news reports that local populations in Peru and Bolivia could no longer afford to buy it, as the prices had doubled or tripled. But before we get into that,
some basics. Quinoa spelled q u I n o A in case you've seen the word but never heard it pronounced. Cooks like rice, looks sort of like couscous, and pack a serious nutritive punch. It's high in protein, contains all the essential amino acids and is high in iron and fiber. It's eaten like a grain, but it's really more like a seed or a vegetable, and it's also gluten free.
In short, it checks a lot of boxes for folks looking to eat fewer animal products or fewer carbs, but is its mainstream popularity hurting the people who grow it. Researchers have called through year's worth of data two thousand four from a national Peruvian survey to find out how the seemingly worldwide kinwa frenzy affected the quality of local citizens lives over that period. The air circumstances actually seem
to have improved. We spoke via email with one of those researchers, Mark F. Bellamare, an associate professor of applied economics and director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. He said, in most cases, we find that rising kinwa prices have modestly increased the welfare of both kinwa producers and kinwa consumer in Peru. At worst, we find a small decline in welfare in some regions, but that decline is almost nil
at less than one percent of total welfare. Welfare here is defined as the value of a household's consumption expenditures. Bell Amare explained, since consumption tends to be a function of income, consumption is a good proxy for income, but it's not necessarily all good news. There are a couple of concerns that could still affect the people who originally
grew kinwa, bell Amare said. The first is that once the price of kinwa fell back down to its level, many small producers told us they were holding onto their grain and the hope that the price would spike back up. But this is highly unlikely to happen, considering that with the kinwa price spike in many new producers got into the kinwa production game, which lowered the price up, probably permanently, unless there's a new spike in the international demand of kinwa.
The other problem is an issue of maintaining biodiversity. Very few varieties of kinwa are exported to places like the US and UK, especially compared with these some hundred varieties grown in Peru, and so if it's most worthwhile for producers to grow for export markets, those other local varieties might disappear forever. This phenomenon isn't good for the long standing health of crops, and it's not a new problem.
Take the banana, but when I say banana, you probably think of a very particular variety of the fruit, like someone greatly enlarged and gently bent a yellow number two pencil. That's a Cavendish banana, and it's the only one many of us encounter outside of the tropics. It's popularity elbowed out other varieties and farmers came to rely on it as a stable export, which sounds great right up until a fungus that affects only that variety swept in and
started destroying crops. If you haven't heard, Scientists are now racing to figure out a way to save it, and that's the danger of monocultures. The Irish potato blight is another example. That's why organizations like biod Adversity International have piloted programs to give native farmers incentives to grow the less in demand varieties of kinwa. So will kinwa ever where out it's welcome, It sure doesn't look that way.
Where it used to be limited to health food stores and vegan restaurants, kinwa is showing up on mainstream menus now in place of rice or pasta as part of main entrees as breakfast cereal, or even added to soups and salads. Hopefully, with cooperation among exporters and researchers, conditions will only continue to improve for Kinwa's growers and for Kinwa itself. Today's episode was written by Alia Hoyt and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and how Stuff Works.
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