The ABC of mainstreaming biodiversity for food and nutrition

Born to Eat Wild: An Integrated Conservation Approach to Secure Wild Food Plants for Food Security and Nutrition

“…Market surveys are also useful to understand what WFPs might be available for consumption within a community. A notable example is represented by BFN Turkey, which undertook market surveys and key informant interviews with 2334 local wild plant gatherers, sellers and consumers of WFPs to capture the diversity of WFPs still being used across three ecogeographic regions [ 28 , 150 ]. Documenting the use of wild plants in this participatory way has several benefits that include: (i) facilitating knowledge transmission from elders to younger generations and between community members; (ii) stimulating local innovation without undermining cultural traditions and local governance mechanisms, and (iii) ensuring that the community can use this diversity to address its own questions, challenges and needs [ 147 ].…”

“…Since the intent is to ensure that WFPs are safeguarded and sustainably consumed, again community participation in the prioritization process is key, for example, to single out species that could be conserved in seed saving facilities, domesticated, or included in breeding programs, or to identify WFPs with the potential to contribute to nutrition, climate-change resilience and other aspects of community well-being. In the earlier example from Turkey, the BFN team developed an ad hoc sustainability index to reduce an initial sample size of 43 species, mostly WFPs, to three target species—foxtail lily ( Eremurus spectabilis ), golden thistle ( Scolymus hispanicus ), and einkorn wheat ( Triticum monococcum )—which have since been the object of domestication research as well as post-harvest handling and value chain analysis [ 150 ].…”

“…Compositional data is key to national nutritional planning and for developing locally fitting dietary guidelines. Seldom, however, does nutrition information appear in national food composition tables and databases, and if data does exist it is either scattered across different sources in institutional databases, in academic journals and grey literature, or is outdated and/or incomplete making data compilation a daunting task [ 28 , 150 ]. An additional hurdle is the standardization of food composition values.…”

“…One of the most recent and comprehensive attempts to fill the evidence gap in food composition data is provided by the GEF-supported Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition Project (BFN). Led by Brazil, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, and implemented by Bioversity International with support from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the project has generated food composition data for 185 plant species, many of them wild, particularly in Brazil and Turkey [ 28 , 150 , 153 ]. Because of the high costs associated with food composition analysis, the four countries carried out literature reviews prior to the project to identify information gaps and narrow down the list of potentially interesting species to a practicable sample size for analysis and to select the species with the greatest potential for conservation, domestication/management, promotion and marketing.…”

Local Solutions for Sustainable Food Systems: The Contribution of Orphan Crops and Wild Edible Species

“…Although the methodology and approaches have been described in greater detail in other publications for the GEF-supported Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition (BFN) Project [26][27][28] and for the IFAD Project [25,29,30], this is the first time the authors attempt to pull together the portfolio of work carried out by Bioversity International and its partner countries to diversify food systems using orphan crops, traditional varieties and wild edible species. Table 1 below provides an overview of the countries' focus by pillar, followed by the indicative length of implementation and budget investments.…”