Director's Message

Paul Johnston, Benson Institute Director, discusses the effects of feed on chicken growth as research to improve the quality of protein in Latin and South America

The following is taken from a Brigham Young University forum speech given on 27 July 1999.

Malnutrition is largely a silent and invisible emergency, exacting a terrible toll on children and their families. It plays a role in more than half of the nearly 12 million deaths each year of children under five in developing countries, a proportion un-matched since the Black Death ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century.

The Ezra Taft Benson Agriculture and Food Institute was organized to face these problems. It was organized in September of 1975, four years after I became a faculty member at Brigham Young University. Shortly after the organization of the Institute, Dr. Lowell Wood, the Institute’s first director, asked me to assist him with a project in Mexico. This began what has been a continuous relationship between myself and the Institute.

On the day the Institute was organized in September of 1975 BYU President Dallin H. Oaks and Ezra Taft Benson set forth the mission of the Benson Institute. President Oaks said:

Using the human, physical, and spiritual resources of Brigham Young University, the Ezra Taft Benson Agriculture and Food Institute will seek to raise the quality of life through improved nutrition and enlightened agricultural practices. It will promote research and teaching that will improve the quantity and quality of food and fiber and thus fill the needs of hungry, undernourished, and poorly clothed people throughout the world.

Ezra Taft Benson then added:

Throughout the world there are vast resources waiting to be used for the betterment of humankind. The objective of the Institute is to use the human, physical, and spiritual resources of BYU to help people of the world to help themselves improve the quality of lives.

The Benson Institute has been working for some time in Latin American countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia. We have recently initiated work in the African countries of Morocco and Ghana. In each country where we are working we affiliate ourselves with local universities. We are currently working with 10 different universities.

Changing the quality of life of the villagers is our major focus. As we work in the developing world, our goal is to overcome hunger and malnutrition. I separate hunger and malnutrition because simply satisfying hunger does not solve malnutrition. Though hunger may be satisfied, many children do not receive vital nutrients that come from a balanced diet and therefore suffer from a multitude of nutritional deficiencies.

We have chosen to make the international students our major instrument for bringing about change at the village level. We invite the students to investigate an issue in the community that addresses a nutrition and/or agricultural production issue, and we provide them with a grant to complete a meaningful study.

We require that students write a research paper and, most importantly, prepare lessons, based on their findings, that are taught to parent groups or in the local schools. We feel that this step differentiates us from other research groups. Not only do we want to study the community, we also want to go the additional step of teaching the village participants how our findings can bring about change in their lives.

Through this course of action we seek to encourage students and faculty to address the needs of malnourished people in their country. Students will graduate with an increased awareness of development needs, and faculty will incorporate development issues into their research programs.

We have between 40 and 50 village studies underway at any given time in the various countries where we work. I would like to share with you one of these studies to demonstrate how our program functions. In this particular study we are working cooperatively with the University of Chimborazo in Riobamba, Ecuador. In that region we have chosen the village of Tunshi San Nicolás as our community laboratory. Raquel Tustón, a student in nutrition and health from Baños, Ecuador, was selected to work with us.

We view the village as a dynamic area of study, a living laboratory. As we begin working in an area we perform a diagnosis of the community to determine the nutrition and food production status. The major crops in Tunshi-San Nicolás are alfalfa, carrots, corn, lettuce, beans, and onions. Most agricultural products are sold rather than consumed. Foods of lower nutritional value are then purchased, such as noodles or rice or costly beverages such as soda pop (in the case of Coca-Cola, the farmer must sell two liters of milk to buy one liter of Coca-Cola). The snapshot we took of San Nicolás revealed that 70 percent of the children suffer from malnutrition. Protein, calcium, and phosphorus are among the many nutrients in which they are deficient.

Eighty-eight percent of the families in Tunshi-San Nicolás have one or more dairy cows. Additional milk consumption would be especially valuable in the diet because of its high protein, calcium, and phosphorus content. Even though almost every family has a dairy cow, 37 percent of the children do not drink even a single glass of milk per week. If children were to consume but one additional cup of milk daily, their intake of protein, calcium, and phosphorus would be increased by 57 percent, 219 percent, and 92 percent respectively.

Because so many children in the community are malnourished, parents accept the malnourished state of children as normal; convincing them that their children’s lives would be improved through additional milk intake is very difficult. To illustrate the value of milk, we conducted a research trial with chickens. We fed the chickens wheat diets supplemented either with Coca-Cola, water, or milk. After six weeks, those receiving milk were ten times the size of the chickens on Coca-Cola. Though the growth differences between malnourished and normal children are not nearly so dramatic, this experiment still serves to illustrate one consequence of malnutrition.

We then posed the question, "If milk were available in greater quantity, would the children drink it?" We conducted taste tests with the children of San Nicolás to test their acceptance of milk and milk-based foods. Results of the test showed that 89 percent of the children liked the taste of raw milk. Products such as pancakes, rice milk, grain cake, eggnog, and milk gelatin received almost unanimous acceptance.

Because we feel that it is important that others be made aware of our findings, we started The Latin American Journal of Agriculture and Nutrition. This is where Raquel Tustón’s findings were published. In addition to sending the journal to many agriculture and nutrition scientists, we send it to 400 Latin American educational institutions and 373 non-governmental development agencies. Tustón wrote 40 health and nutrition lessons based upon her studies. We then employed her as a graduate intern to teach her lessons in the community.

Knowing the value of milk in the diet and recognizing that children like milk and milk-based recipes, we tried to find a way that we could increase the level of milk production. It was noted that 95 percent of the families produce alfalfa hay, an excellent feed for cows, but don’t feed it to their cows. Instead, they sell it as a cash crop. Dr. Roy Silcox of the BYU Animal Science Department and his graduate student, Robert Stirling, suggested to the farmers that some of the hay should be kept back from sale and fed to the cows in the evening as a dietary supplement. Tests in San Nicolás showed that this practice improved milk production by 20 percent. It is our hope as we continue to work with this community that we will find ways to stimulate increased milk production and at the same time encourage its greater use in the family diet.

Our ultimate goal is to improve the quality of life of those with whom we work by enlisting the services of faculty and students from BYU and from the developing world.