About Us
Food Plants International was formally established in 1999, but its origins go back to 1980. Bruce French, founder of FPI, was living in Papua New Guinea at the time, and noticed that many villagers suffered disease and malnutrition, often while surrounded by nutritious food plants.
It wasn't that they didn't know anything about their local plants, but there were clearly a lot more edible plants than was readily recognised. Also, there was very little nutritional information available about the plants. Bruce also observed that most of the information taught in agricultural colleges related to temperate plants commonly produced in Western agriculture.
From these humble beginnings, Bruce set out to document the food plants of PNG, an effort that soon spread to include the entire world of food plants.
The people who make up FPI are based in Tasmania, Australia. We are all volunteers who wish to make a difference to the 3 billion people of the world whose most important concern each day is having enough nutritious food to eat.
We each bring different skills to FPI, but we sometimes find there are skills we need that don't exist in our group. If you have time and skills that you think may be of use to FPI, feel free to contact us.
We sometimes advertise for specific skills through the Pro Bono Australia Volunteermatch web site, so it may pay to check there occasionally - http://www.volunteermatch.com.au.
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