Bioversity International Gender and Value Chain Specialist Nadezda Amaya reports on a training session organized with farmers in Guatemala on a novel way to use local leafy vegetable chaya to enhance protein consumption.

Per capita protein intake among Guatemalans is among the lowest in Central America. Black beans are the main source of protein for the population but other local plants can also play an important role in improving diet quality. In particular, the native leafy vegetable chaya (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius) has been gaining recognition for its high protein content and potential to make significant nutritional contributions in vulnerable communities. Chaya’s dry protein content is higher than that of common bean (31% versus 25%) and it contains about two times more protein than spinach (Spinacia oleracea) and amaranth leaves (Amaranthus hybridus).

While conducting a value chain study on chaya in Guatemala and Mexico in the project “Linking Agrobiodiversity Value Chains, Climate Adaptation and Nutrition: Empowering the Poor to Manage Risks”, I discovered that the Mexican Secretary of Public Education has been carrying out very interesting work with chaya in rural communities in the State of Yucatan. They have been teaching and promoting a process to extract its vegetable protein to enrich food preparations. It was clear that this approach had a lot of potential to benefit populations in Guatemala.

To share this knowledge in Guatemala, I organized a workshop in Camotán, Chiquimula with guest instructor, Javier Rodríguez from the Mexican Secretary of Public Education. In the hands-on workshop, local producers actively participated in the extraction process and in using the protein and fiber obtained to prepare different foods, such as tortillas, scrambled eggs and lemonade. All participants enjoyed the dishes and many expressed their desire to use this method at home, given its ease of replication and importance in supplementing their diets.

Aside from local producers, other participants in this workshop included representatives from the government, university, and local, national and international NGOs, who were open to share and learn from each other’s experiences. One of the participants was a local organization called Mancomunidad Copan Ch'orti' which promotes rural development in Chiquimula. The participants from Mancomunidad were so impressed that following the workshop they organized a trip to the city of Merida in the State of Yucatan, Mexico to learn more and to develop collaborations to further promote the role of chaya and other native plants for improved nutrition.

Another interesting side result of the workshop was the interest that the owner of the venue where the workshop took place showed. She participated in the workshop, learned the process and decided to teach it to her daughter and schoolmates for their school science fair. The goal of this fair was to identify a problem and find a solution, which they chose to be malnutrition and chaya respectively. The name of their project was “nutrition at your fingertips”. During the science fair these high school students explained the importance of consuming chaya, and showed how to extract protein from it and how to used it i.e. they prepared different dishes with chaya such as rice, cakes, drinks, tortillas and tamales. Given their great work, they won the first place of their high school science fair and soon will represent Chiquimula in a bigger fair.

These experiences are a reminder of the importance of bringing together different actors and organizations, who can help to promote chaya production, marketing, and consumption, especially in drought-prone vulnerable communities where this plant can be easily produce and make significant nutritional contribution. Read more about the protein extraction process and the workshop in the proceedings.

 For more information, read the proceedings of the workshop  [6] (2.9 MB)

The workshop “Leveraging chaya’s nutritional values through protein extraction” was organized as part of the IFAD-EU funded project “Linking Agrobiodiversity Value Chains, Climate Adaptation and Nutrition: Empowering the Poor to Manage Risks” linked to the CGIAR Research Programmes on Agriculture for Food and Nutrition and Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security.

Further reading:

• Chaya: Mayan vegetable enriching diets year-round in Mesoamerica   [7]
• Research brief: Value chain and market potential of Chaya to strengthen climate resilience, nutrition security and incomes in Guatemala  [8]
• Uniting efforts to enhance the use of neglected Mayan superfood chaya   [9]
• Promoting chaya and tepary bean for better nutrition and climate resilience in Guatemala  [10]