A People’s Scientist Meets a Tiny Fish

When you spend a lot of time thinking about the fate of global food security in an era of mounting environmental crises, ascending authoritarianism, spiraling wealth inequality, and metastasizing wars, bouts of despair are an occupational hazard. During such times, listening to people like Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, winner of the 2021 World Food Prize, is a reliable antidote. On the latest episode of Unconfined, you can do just that. The episode represents a break from our usual focus on the US scene. But when the opportunity arose to converse with such a prominent scientist, we couldn’t pass it up. And her insights have plenty to teach US policymakers, we decided.  

Born and raised in Trinidad & Tobago in a family descended from Indian immigrants, Thilsted directs the Nutrition, Health and Food Security Impact Area Platform at CGIAR, a global partnership to end hunger through agricultural research and innovation. While CGIAR grew out of the Green Revolution, the 1960s-1970s-era effort to bring US-style commodity agriculture to the Global South, Thilsted doesn’t indulge the idea of silver-bullet fixes to hunger. Often, her work shows real solutions lie in better management of local resources, not in pricy imported technologies.  

Her most famous example lies in the four million household ponds of Bangladesh, a source of village- and family-level sustenance for generations. When Thilsted arrived in the country as a researcher in the late 1980s, families had been, for about a generation, purchasing expensive pesticides every year to “clean” their ponds before stocking them with carp or tilapia. The goal: to maximize production of those cash-crop species by wiping out indigenous wild fish. Thilsted had the insight that the practice, encouraged by international development agencies to reduce poverty by generating income, might actually be cutting families’ nutritional intake. At the time, more than half of the country’s children under five suffered from stunting.  

Her research found that a particular type of wild fish turned out to be a nutritional powerhouse: the mola, a tiny species packed with vitamin A and other vital nutrients. Thilsted and her research collaborators found that by rejecting pesticides and allowing the mola and other wild fish to thrive, family ponds could supply nutrient-dense fish for family consumption alongside a harvest of marketable carp and tilapia. They called the system “pond polyculture.” As the World Food Prize organizers put it in a tribute to Thilsted, “Contrary to popular belief at the time, small fish did not compete with large fish for space or food. Instead, the approach increased total productivity [of the ponds] by as much as five times, as well as enhancing species diversity and nutritional value of the production.” The group added: 

Consumption of fish in the home increased when Thilsted introduced an inexpensive, homemade gill net designed for women to easily harvest mola in small amounts for daily household use. Importantly, though mola only accounted for 15 percent of production by weight, it contributed 54 percent of vitamin A, 42 percent of vitamin B12 and a quarter of the calcium and iron of the needs of a family of four.

She didn’t stop there. Unlike many northern-world development experts, Thilsted understood that increasing production alone would not solve Bangladesh’s hunger problem. Working with villagers and their traditional recipes, she worked at preserving the annual harvest by developing dried-fish productions that could be used year-round. “Improvements in processing practices also resulted in reduced fish waste and loss and increased incomes for entrepreneurs, most of them women, who produced these value-added foods,” the World Food Prize tribute states. She also promoted combinations of dried fish, rice, and vitamin A-dense sweet potatoes.  

These innovations contributed to a significant improvement in health outcomes for the nation’s children. Between 2000 and 2018, the rate of childhood stunting dropped from 50.8 percent to 36 percent, and childhood mortality fell by more than half. She later encouraged rice farmers in Cambodia to establish fish-bearing ponds alongside cultivation of sweet potatoes and other vegetables, to improve and diversify their own diets even as they continue producing a staple cash crop. 

In our conversation, I got this charismatic and accomplished people’s scientist to explain how she pulled off all this, and to talk about what she’s up to currently. I learned a lot, and I ended up buzzing with a strong sense that a world of widespread abundance is possible, if decision-makers can learn to think beyond the lure of silver bullets. 

For more CLF insights on aquatic foods in the developing world, see: