Hello Moderator.
Thank you for recognizing the need to discuss the egg as a powerful tool for mitigating poverty and malnutrition among the poor communities of the world.
I grew up in rural eastern Kenya where the egg was generally accepted as a currency.
Our parents would send us to the market to 'buy' basic household utilities; mostly salt, sugar, soap, kerosene, cooking oil and onions using eggs as currency.
At school we later came to learn about barter trade, though it wasn't the case here. Essentially eggs were treated as currency because the shopkeepers never used to cook and eat the eggs that they collected from us as it would have been the case in a true barter trade situation.
It's possible to bring the egg back to its rightful economic position in rural livelihoods not as a currency anymore but as a means of addressing malnutrition, unemployment and generating income for rural and urban even development.
This is achievable through the use of research based egg production systems with a corresponding creation of demand for the eggs through innovative and affordable food formulations. For example, the infusion of eggs into traditional dishes would go a long way in achieving this.
The challenge of generating green house gases would be addressed through the small-scale egg production approach which would disperse the the impact of the gases over a wide geographical area.
Above all this, there's urgent need to educate and sensitize the involved communities about the importance of the egg and its 'newly acquired socio-economic status' so that they don't end up selling eggs to buy low nutritional value food commodities as we did in the 1960s and 70s.
We should work together towards making the egg to occupy it's rightful place among communities as a generator of currency and good health but never again as a currency itself.
Lawrence Matolo,
Machakos County,
Eastern Kenya.
M. Lawrence Matolo