It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu.

Crop scientist Siddrique Habia Rameh is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and a series of refugee camps following his escape from his country.

It taught him hard lessons about food insecurity, which he's now using to solve hunger.

In his TED 2020 talk, he shares the

almost magic power of quinoa that will make you appreciate this humble grain far more.

Like so many of you, when I'm hungry, I open the fridge and get myself something to eat

any time I want. This is something myself something to eat anytime I want.

This is something most of us who live in a developed country don't think much about.

However, it is a luxury that I didn't think I would ever have in my life when I lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania 23 years ago,

or even seven years ago when I was living in my home

country of Rwanda before I moved to the USA. I was only seven years old when my home country of

Rwanda went through the tragedy of the genocide. That took so many lives and make us free the

country and we became refugees. Life in a refugee camp? It wasn't life. It was a survival.

I saw a lot of people dying from disease, poor sanitation, hunger. Food became a rare commodity.

There were bad days my family and I would survive on the leaves and grasses from the forest.

There were also worse times when we would go two or three days without anything to eat at

all, only drinking water from the swamp.

After three years in a refugee camp, we decided to return back to Rwanda,

and our struggle with the food continued. However, farming proved to be the only reliable

source of food, but our food lacked the nutritional diversity, and we continue to depend on

food assistance from the United Nations World Food Program to balance our diet.

Still today, more than 70% of Rwandans, they work in agriculture sector, but malnutrition and stounding remain rampant.

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