The ‘Quinoa Project’, a global project to cultivate quinoa on a trial run is being implemented in seven regions of Iran including Iranshahr in collaboration with Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), IRNA quoted head of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Research Center of Tehran Province (ANRCT) and project advisor Niaz Ali Sepahvand as saying.
Iranshahr is capital of Iranshahr County. It is located 340 km south of Zahedan in Sistan and Baluchestan Province.
Quinoa is a grain crop grown primarily for its edible seeds. It is a pseudo-cereal rather than a true cereal and was originally grown in Southern America. It is cooked and used similar to rice.
Translated, quinoa means “The Mother Grain” and fittingly, it can be used as a supplementary food due to its numerous benefits.
It is a grain with outstanding and intrinsic characteristics including its ability to adapt to adverse conditions of climate and soil where other crops cannot grow, especially at high altitudes. Unlike other grains and cereals, quinoa is protein rich, containing all the essential amino acids, making it an ideal food for all diets.
The cost of production, when compared to traditional crops such as potatoes and maize, is significantly lower because the harvesting is less labor intensive.
“The project has been implemented to ensure food security in various countries, and 17 types of the pseudo-grain have been planted in Iran so far,” said head of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Research Center of Iranshahr (ANRCI) Khaled Miri.
The United Nations General Assembly declared 2013 as the “International Year of Quinoa” in recognition of ancestral practices of the Andean people, who have preserved it as food for present and future generations. The objective is to draw the world’s attention to the role that quinoa could play in providing food security, nutrition, and poverty eradication.
A workshop for production, processing, and use of quinoa was held at ANRCI on Tuesday at the Iran Seed and Plant Improvement Institute.
