Exhibitors at the five-day event that opened Thursday include nearly 300 so-called "sentinels," producers of little-known foodstuffs threatened with extinction.

Among them are Mobodj Rokhaya, a nomad from the small Imraguen ethnic group in southern Mauritania. They track schools of golden mullet fish, the men catching them and extracting their roe, the women cleaning them.

Their livelihood, which depends on age-old expertise practiced in a rare setting of desert-ocean interaction, is increasingly threatened by industrial fishing.

In addition, they feel they are being underpaid for the roe by the middle man currently handling the export business.

"We're looking for equipment to vacuum-seal the roe so we can sell it directly to importers at a better price," Rokhaya explained at her stand.

They took the first step towards independence by sending three women on a training course in the northern Italian region of Tuscany earlier this year.

Soon, a group of Italian fishermen will go to Mauritania's second city Nouadhibou to help them equip their factory.

A few steps away, a stand displays blond lentils from Saint Flour, in central France.

Cultivated as early as 1785, the lentils disappeared in the 1960s when they were replaced by crops for animal feed.

"The idea of reviving the blond lentil came in 1995," lentil grower Pierre Jarlier told AFP, "when a priest put a notice in the parish missal looking for seed."

"One of my colleagues found some in his grandfather's attic. ... We selected two varieties of blond lentil, and sales resumed in 2002. Today there are 25 of us producers and we sell 55 tonnes of lentils a year," he said. "We're living a fairy tale."

Fine food stores, mainly in Paris and the Auvergne region of central France, are the main buyers.

For growers of hazelnuts in Pando, Bolivia, survival depends on the fight against deforestation.

Living near the border with Brazil, the people of the Pando plain gather the shells and break them with machetes to extract the nuts.

Local sales of the hazelnuts -- dipped in chocolate or caramel -- do not generate enough to make a living for the Pando producers. With help from an association and the Slow Food Foundation, they have set up a cooperative and are developing a more sophisticated product to export to Europe.

The Slow Food Movement, founded in 1989, defines itself in opposition to the craze for "fast food".

Its aims include fighting "the disappearance of local food traditions and people's dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world."

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