MALNUTRITION: African Potato Lab Fights Malnutrition With Biofortification

Matthew Shechmeister April 26, 2011

Photo: Grant Lee Neuenburg/Wired.com : A technician prepares a sample of sweet potato cells that will be screened for viruses before being propagated.


Although the International Potato Center sounds like a place where Idaho fifth-graders are dragged on field trips, in reality it's a sprawling organization promoting rural development around the globe.
Headquartered in Peru, the potato's ancestral home, The Center operates a seed bank that includes over 4,000 varieties of potato, sweet potato and other crops. Through a network of offices in 30 countries, the Center distributes plants to local farmers and adds new breeds to its library.
The Center and its allies have been on a campaign against vitamin A deficiency, a common problem in less-developed regions of the world. The consequences of vitamin A deficiency are devastating, especially for children, leading to blindness and a higher likelihood of death from measles, diarrhea and other illnesses. Consistently distributing tens of millions of multivitamin tablets could solve the problem, but that option can be difficult to achieve because of shaky distribution networks.
Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes are naturally high in vitamin A, and grow well in countries across the globe. For subsistence farmers, crop yields are a matter of life and death, so biofortification focuses on plants that are particularly reliable and productive
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/04/potato-lab/?pid=791&pageid=4286

MALNUTRITION: BANGLADESH: Bio-fortification - finding nature’s power foods

 Photo: Ayub Farhat/IRIN
Zinc-rich rice - coming soon to markets if scientists have their way

DHAKA, 8 March 2011 (IRIN) - Scientists are using selective plant breeding known as bio-fortification to mass produce a high-zinc rice in Bangladesh within the next five years that can reduce micronutrient shortages.
Unlike typical food fortification, when a mineral is added to a food once it has been harvested and processed, with bio-fortification, scientists seek out nature’s super foods to boost the nutrition of less enriched varieties either through genetic modification or selective breeding.
More rice is consumed per person in Bangladesh than in any other country where it is considered a staple food, according to local NGO Bangladesh Rice Foundation.
Most Bangladeshis cannot afford to eat animal products, which have a naturally higher level of zinc, according to HarvestPlus, the Washington-based NGO overseeing the high-zinc rice project.
That leaves rice as their main source - though insufficient - of zinc.
Trained bio-fortification breeders at the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute are testing seeds selected from hundreds of thousands of rice strains chosen for their naturally high zinc content.
Scientists are then cross-breeding the zinc-rich rice with widely grown rice varieties to see what takes root in Bangladesh’s soil and climate.
“The very best lines are then tested at many different locations in Bangladesh on breeding stations and on-farm,” said HarvestPlus’s head of production development, Wolfgang Pfeiffer.
A small selection of top-performing seeds will be multiplied and released in 2013 “on a massive scale to farmers”, he said. The cost is still in question, but must be affordable enough for the poor, HarvestPlus said.
Getting farmers to agree to a new breed may be difficult said the NGO’s manager in Bangladesh, Rezaul Karim.
“Farmers are risk averse. However we are planning an educational campaign about the benefits of bio-fortified rice. If consumers are motivated, farmers will be motivated.”
The bio-fortified rice is expected to look and taste the same as non-fortified rice, which though comforting, may carry at least one risk noted Karim.
“It will be very difficult to distinguish the seeds [of different rice strains]. If [another] crop fails, this could lead to a bad reputation [for the zinc-rich hybrid strain].”
HarvestPlus is trying to develop high-zinc rice in other countries, as well as wheat, maize, cassava, beans and pearl millet said Pfeiffer.

Zinc and stunting
Zinc shortage is a “significant public health nutrition problem” for Bangladesh’s children under five years old, leading to a “pervasively high prevalence of stunting [low height- to-age ratio]”, said Tahmeed Ahmed, the head of nutrition and senior scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. (ICDDR-B).
In 2009, 43 percent of under-five children in Bangladesh had moderate or severe stunting, which is the most common measure of chronic malnutrition and the leading cause of preventable mental disability worldwide, according to World Health Organization.
In most cases of stunting and poor immune response, the absence of zinc is to blame; its absence also affects how the body processes other life-saving nutrients, according to HarvestPlus.
Seven out of 10 women in Bangladesh do not get enough zinc in their diets, according to preliminary studies by ICDDR-B.
Lack of zinc in pregnant women can boost the risk of pregnancy complications, including low birth weight babies or stillbirths, warned HarvestPlus.





A woman fetching water in Dhaka, Bangladesh


http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=92132

POVERTY: Bringing agriculture and health back together

Jeff Waage
24 August 2010
Involving health experts in agricultural development projects can help to foresee health threats and improve project design
Agriculture and health experts must work together to tackle disease, poverty and malnutrition, says development expert Jeff Waage.
The relationship between agriculture and health may seem intuitive and simple — grow more crops and people will have more food and live healthier lives. But because agriculture and health policies are rarely coordinated, the reality is far more complex.
The truth is that despite a huge increase in agricultural productivity and food availability over the past 50 years, and falling food prices, about a billion people remain chronically undernourished.
At the same time, production of cheap refined cereals, sugars and fats is contributing to urban diets that are energy dense and nutrient poor, leading to rapidly growing rates of obesity and diabetes, and associated chronic diseases. This dietary transition is now being seen in countries like China, India and Mexico.
A burden on the poor
Health problems related to agriculture are particularly acute in low and middle income countries. Governments there may face both chronic rural undernutrition and worsening urban diets — a 'double burden' of diet-related disease.
Developing nations also have the greatest food safety threats from chemical and biological contamination in the food chain, such as pesticides, mycotoxins and zoonotic disease, as well as threats from wildlife and livestock, such as the Ebola virus and avian flu.
Most of the poor in these countries are farmers and farm workers, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, including the income needed to buy health services. Threats to agriculture become threats to health.
The reverse is also true. Diseases such as HIV/AIDS not only exacerbate malnutrition but can devastate labour, farm productivity and livelihoods. A study in Kenya has shown that the death of male household heads can slash per capita household food production by two thirds. These health and agriculture interactions create a downward spiral of declining health and resources.
Health and agriculture together
The key to tackling these problems lies in better integration of health and agricultural interventions and policy. To start, this means identifying negative interactions and working together to address them.
For example, irrigation projects that increase yields may unintentionally encourage diseases such as malaria or schistosomiasis. In Sri Lanka, intensification projects that have introduced both irrigation and pig production have created ideal conditions for Japanese encephalitis, whose mosquito vectors breed in ditches and use pigs as alternative hosts.
Involving health experts in agricultural development projects can help to foresee such threats and improve project design.
More generally, the focus of agricultural development on increasing the supply and reducing the cost of food energy — that is, carbohydrates and fats — has helped to imbalance human diets. Agriculture and health experts must work together to re-establish the balance by making foods with essential micronutrients cheaper and easier to access.
Barriers to integration
What stands in the way of integrating agriculture and health research for development?
In part, it is a language barrier: agriculturalists, for example, may talk of improving health in terms of food energy, while health specialists deal in disability adjusted life years (DALYs).
And most of our estimates of food consumption and dietary health — from which we estimate undernutrition — come from extrapolating agricultural production statistics, not from real measures of what people eat and how this affects their health.
Common metrics and methods would underpin an integrated approach. For instance, a recent study on 'golden rice' — rice engineered for high vitamin A content — in the Philippines, expresses the benefits of agricultural innovation in terms of DALYs, while a study in Mongolia on the zoonotic disease, brucellosis, integrates animal production and human health metrics in predicting the cost effectiveness of control.
But the most important barrier to integration is the longstanding isolation of agriculture and health, and their research and policy processes. We see these 'silos' in the UN's intergovernmental bodies, in national ministries and in universities.
A fragmented development landscape can reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of policy interventions.
Take strategies for improving basic nutrition. There are four proven ways of doing this: supplementing diets of the poor, fortifying processed foods, breeding more nutritious crops (biofortification) and encouraging greater agricultural and dietary diversity.
In principle, these methods comprise an excellent and flexible toolbox that, in the right combination, offers one of the best ways of halting malnutrition. But each method is 'owned' and promoted by different communities of health or agricultural specialists, making a joined-up approach difficult.
Joined-up action
The solution is for researchers from both backgrounds to work better together towards common goals. The new Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agricultural and Health (LCIRAH) is a step in this direction.
It brings together academics from health, agriculture and other disciplines across the social and natural sciences to define and build agri-health research for international development. The agency is an initiative of the London International Development Centre, a University of London consortium that applies interdisciplinary approaches to complex development problems.
Besides LCIRAH, there are other hopeful signs that silos are crumbling. For example, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is preparing a programme for agriculture and health research.
And concepts of 'one health' and 'eco-health' — which link animal systems, human health and environment — are being incorporated into practical programmes in the UN and elsewhere.
Two development sectors that should never have been separated are slowly coming together again.

Professor Jeff Waage is director of the London International Development Centre and chair of the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health.
http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/bringing-agriculture-and-health-back-together.html