The scruffy
looking, fast-growing, drought-resistant Moringa Oleifera tree can be found in every
country of West Africa. The tree is edible,
tasty and highly nutritious in all its parts, with leaves, leaf powder, pods, seeds,
flowers, roots and bark offering a complement of protein, calcium, minerals, iron and
several important vitamins.
The announcement
of an international conference will come as part of the HIV/AIDS & Malaria Conference’s
workshop “Partnerships in Research on Traditional Medicines,” being offered
today from 2-4 p.m. and repeated Friday, April 14, from 10-12:30 p.m.
Being held at the Atlanta Apparel
Mart, the conference’s chair, Hon. Ambassador Young, has become such a Moringa tree
fan that when he was hospitalized for prostate cancer surgery last December, he asked
well-wishers to donate Moringa tree seedlings through Church World Service instead of
sending him flowers. “Here is an
indigenous nutritional supplement that people can grow in their own backyards,” he
commented.
At the workshop
today and Friday, Lowell Fuglie, a Lutheran and a Minnesota native who heads Church World
Service’s West Africa regional office in Dakar, Senegal, will present the results of
pioneering research on the Moringa tree’s exceptional nutritional value especially
among children and their mothers, conducted by CWS and its Senegalese partner, AGADA, in
collaboration with government health services and local health posts. Because of Moringa’s accessibility at no
cost, malnourished children have recovered more quickly than under the “classic”
treatments which obliged their parents to purchase what is, for them, expensive items like
cooking oil, sugar and milk powder.
Now Church World Service – the
relief, development and refugee assistance arm of the (U.S.) National Council of Churches
and working in partnership with indigenous organizations in more than 80 countries –
wants to expand cultivation of the Moringa tree and test its potential contribution to
good nutrition and thus to improved immunity and longer, healthier life for people with
HIV infection.
The April 13-15 HIV/AIDS &
Malaria International Conference is bringing together African government ministers of
health, non-governmental organizations, representatives of the World Health Organization
and Centers of Disease Control and others to offer a platform for an “African
Response” to the pandemic diseases of HIV/AIDS and malaria.
It is organized by the American
Medical Team for Africa, an Atlanta-based not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to
reducing poverty and improving the quality of life in Africa by assisting the healthcare
sector with medical related supplies, medical training and facilitating partnerships with
American healthcare institutions.
On the eve of the conference, the
chair, Ambassador Young – who is National Council of Churches President in 2000-2001
– explained, “Everyone gets together and talks about AIDS and curses the
darkness. We wanted to try to light a few
candles and give people a feeling they are not helpless in regard to AIDS. One thing HIV-infected people must do is maintain
as high a basic nutritional standard as they can. One
of the indigenous ways of doing this is the Moringa tree.
“I’d seen the Moringa tree
growing all over Africa and never paid attention to it,” Ambassador Young said. “Then just last November, at the National
Council of Churches General Assembly, I heard about Church World Service’s Moringa
project. Here is an indigenous nutritional
supplement that people can grow in their own backyards.
“When the Minister of Health
from Senegal came to my house during the Christmas holidays and said, ‘Can you help
us? Everything everyone tells us to do about AIDS, we can’t afford,’ I gave him
some of the Moringa literature.” Ambassador
Young added, “We are not pushing the Moringa tree as a cure for anything. But in terms of the opportunistic infections that
HIV-infected people die from, the Moringa is one possible source of strength to the human
immune system.”
The Moringa Oleifera tree is native
to sub-Himalayan tracts of northern India but now distributed world-wide in the tropics
and subtropics. In 1997, Church World Service
and AGADA undertook a pilot project in Ziguinchor and Bignona (Casamance region,
south-western Senegal) that documented the nutritional value of Moringa leaves and dried
leaf powder and their usefulness in preventing or quickly curing cases of malnutrition. Laboratory analysis of the nutritional content of
leaves harvested in Senegal provided additional confirmation. Results are published in CWS’s March 1999
book “The Miracle Tree.”
Leaves can be cooked like spinach or
used for a sauce called Mboum in Wolof and
served over rice or couscous. Leaves also can
be easily dried into a powder and stored for long periods.
Young pods can be cooked like green beans.
Older pods, seeds, flowers, roots and bark also are edible, nutritious and
tasty. Even in areas where Moringa trees are
scarce, they can be quickly introduced. Moringa
will grow readily from seed and reach 12 feet in a year, flower and produce fruit.
Just one of the many people who have
benefited from Moringa products is Awa Diedhiou, who weighed only 3 pounds, 5 ounces at
birth. Her mother, Maissata, 22, was very
weak and dizzy. Maissata was counseled to add
Moringa leaf powder to her meals. “My
dizziness went away, and I started producing enough milk,” Maissata said. By age 5 months, Awa weighed 11 pounds.
NOTE:
Mr. Fuglie will be available for interviews April 13-15 in Atlanta and April
20-22 in New York City before returning to Dakar, Senegal.
-end-
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