Could Australia's floral emblem hold answers for a hungry world?

Saturday 2 August 2014 9:31AM (view full episode)

As food security becomes an increasing challenge into the future, experts believe indigenous foods may hold the key to feeding hungry nations. Australia's acacias, commonly known as wattles, are leading the charge. Cathy Pryor reports.

Australian wattle trees, or acacias, were first introduced to Africa more than three decades ago in a bid to increase soil nutrients and stave off erosion. Over the years they stood tall, thriving in a common climate. What was less known was the seeds they bore could also be an important food source for a hungry continent.

In the midst of the famine that gripped parts of the continent in the 1980s, the irony could not have been more bitter. It took a forestry worker visiting from Australia to ask a simple question: did the villagers know that the seeds on these trees had been eaten by indigenous Australians for millennia?

We have created a population where nearly one billion people are malnourished and another one billion are overweight and that is a result of this heavy investment in starchy staple crops that do a lot to fill people up but don't really nourish them.

Danielle Nierenberg, president of Food Tank

Peter Yates, an anthropologist and advisor to World Vision Australia, recounts the story of how this one chance question sparked a trans-continental quest to introduce acacia seeds to African diets. Yates previously lived in Central Australia and ran a bush foods marketing business.

He is now part of a team of development workers, scientists and African farmers who have been working on the Acacia Tree Project for the past 30 years. The aim is ambitious: to establish local acacia seed industries that can feed villagers and create a tradeable commodity, as well as providing a local food source that can be drawn upon in years of famine, instead of relying on food drops from Europe and the USA.

'The Acacia Saligna seed, we think, has about 18 per cent useable protein—that is the digestible amino acids,' Yates says.

'It is also fairly rich in starch and therefore energy which is often lacking in a poor vegetarian diet. In Ethiopia at any given time there are seven million people hungry, it is just normal, so the idea that you can improve food availability in a normal year is actually very beneficial.'

There are more than 980 species of acacia in Australia and they grow in almost every ecosystem around the nation. It is known that at least 40 of them were traditionally eaten by Aboriginal Australians, with the number of species used for food probably even higher. The traditional method of harvesting the acacia seed varied, but a common method was to simply hit the trunk of the tree with a stick once the seed pods were ready to fall.

It is this same method that is being trialled in nations such as Ethiopia and Niger, where the diet is 95 per cent vegetarian and poverty precludes many from acquiring protein from meat.

While there are a few species of acacia that are native to Africa, the trees are slow growing and their seeds are spiny and toxic with high levels of cyanide. In the Australian species of acacia, the cyanide levels are low and other toxins can be removed through a simple roasting process.

The Acacia Seed Project team is now in discussions with the Ethiopian government in the hope clinical trials will be approved in the next 12 months to prove that there are indeed nutritional benefits to introducing acacia seeds to local diets. Yates believes he already has evidence on how beneficial they could be. He has worked with communities in Niger to modify more than 20 local recipes, replacing a proportion of the traditional millet with acacia seeds.

'We invented a porridge mix which is designed to help with premature weaning,' he says. 'There is the belief in Africa that when a woman becomes pregnant her milk becomes toxic so the child that was feeding is plucked from the breast and handed over to a grandmother or other relative. The child loses weight hand over fist because they are fed millet porridge which is just like having a diet of bread and water, which is no good for anyone.'

'We have tried to make something available with something that they had already. What you don't want to do is say "you people don't have the capacity". We just want to show them that if they take what they have and add to it slightly, they will be able to feed their children properly.'

Danielle Nierenberg is the president of Food Tank, an organisation which was established last year in Washington DC to promote and research food security issues. She is also the former co-director of Nourishing the Planet, a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She believes indigenous foods like acacia seeds could hold the key to combating malnutrition and food security into the future.

Nierenberg argues that for too long indigenous plants have been dismissed as a weed or a poor person's food and investment in agriculture has been heavily weighted towards crops such as rice, maize, soy, and wheat. However these introduced staples, while providing starchy bulk and calories, lack the protein and nutrients a truly healthy diet requires.


'Indigenous foods can be very important because in a lot of cases we can go forward in improving food security by looking back.'


Peter Yates
Anthropologist and consultant with World Vision Australia
Danielle Nierenberg
President of Food Tank, Washington DC, USA


Michael Mackenzie
Cathy Pryor