The
Director of HarvestPlus, Dr Howarth Bouis, has said developing and delivering crops
that carry essential micronutrients required by the body cells to function
adequately to target vulnerable population is key to solving the global problem
of micronutrient deficiencies, also known as hidden hunger.
Dr
Bouis, who was in Nigeria on a working visit, said this during a lecture he
delivered at the Conference Center, IITA, Ibadan on Thursday, September 17,
2015.
He highlighted
why mineral and vitamin deficiencies constitute a significant public health
problem and efforts by stakeholders to address the problem through dietary
diversification, supplementation to children aged zero to 59 months, food
fortification, and biofortification.
He described
biofortification, which is the breeding
of crops to increase their nutritional value, as the most viable and
cost-effective strategy in the chain of solutions adopted by policy-makers. This
is so because 75 percent of target vulnerable population lives in the rural
areas where they eat mostly what they plant and making the staple crops carry
essential vitamin and minerals provides a great opportunity to reach them in a
cost-effective and sustainable way.
Delivering
a lecture entitled “Biofortification of food staples: progress and future
strategy,” Dr Bouis gave account of the progress HarvestPlus has made on biofortification
project from conceptualization, breeding of crops, delivering of seeds to
farmers for multiplication, production, value addition to select food staples,
marketing and consumption of food products in over 27 countries where the crops
– cassava, maize, cowpea, sorghum, millet, wheat, rice, and orange sweet potato
– have been released.
Examining the consequences of vitamin and mineral deficiencies,
Dr Bouis said, “Available record shows that 375,000 children go blind every
year and a sizeable others died due to vitamin A deficiency. Iron deficiency
leads to impaired cognitive abilities that are not reversible while zinc
deficiency increase incidence of severe diarrhea and stunting as well as over
450,000 deaths annually.”
HarvestPlus currently works in 43
countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America to deliver vitamin A cassava,
vitamin A maize, vitamin A sweet potato, iron beans, iron pearl millet, zinc
rice and zinc wheat, targeting over
2 billion affected people globally. In Nigeria, HarvestPlus has
delivered vitamin A cassava to over one million households while plans have
been concluded to deliver vitamin A maize from 2016.
According
to Dr Bouis, over 2 million households are currently multiplying the
biofortified crops while ongoing research is focused on a number of other
crops, which have capacities to deliver these essential micronutrients to
target population. He
added that HarvestPlus’s biofortification project is gender-sensitive and has continued
to empower women farmers alongside their male counterparts because of their crucial
role in decision-making at household level and in nation-building.
Rounding
off the lecture, Dr Bouis thanked the donors who have made biofortification
possible and called for sustained efforts to enable a continuous delivery of
biofortified food staples to vulnerable population across the globe until
hidden hunger is eradicated and consumption of more nutritious foods become a
lifestyle for all.
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