Fighting malnutrition is not just about giving hungry people more food. It is also about improving the quality of food that they eat. That was the message from Howarth Bouis, director of HarvestPlus, a CGIAR Challenge Program that promotes micronutrient-rich staple food crops through biofortification.
In an interview during a recent visit to India, Bouis said that too often, the focus of policy makers tackling malnutrition is on the number of calories, rather than on what goes to make up the daily food intake.
“The basic thing everyone does is to buy enough cereals to avoid going hungry, unless you are ultra-poor and can’t even do that. But most of the poor can afford as much of rice, or wheat, as they can eat”, said Bouis, who was attending a conference on biofortification.
Making the crucial step from quantity to quality is key to making real improvements in people’s health and nutrition, believes Bouis.
“The huge difference between low-income and high-income groups is in the consumption of non-staple foods — fruits, vegetables and pulses,” he said. “I think that’s what is limiting better nutrition, not just in India but in much of the developing world.”
Improved nutrition is one of the four driving principles that shape the CGIAR’s research agenda. Poor people, especially women and children, often suffer from a lack of micronutrients in their diets. Solutions to the problem include diversifying production systems and developing improved crop varieties. The CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health for example, specifically targets this issue. It seeks to redirect agricultural development towards better health and nutrition benefits.
Fighting hidden hunger
In a bid to fight what has been dubbed hidden hunger, HarvestPlus has partnered with a number of governments and partners to introduce micronutrient-rich crops in several countries. These include iron-rich beans and pearl millet, vitamin A-rich cassava, maize and sweet potato and rice and wheat biofortified with zinc.
Lack of knowledge about healthy food sources is an important contributing factor to poor nutrition in many developing countries. A workshop in Timor-Leste, organized by CGIAR Consortium member WorldFish and partners, examined the potential of fish farming for providing healthy food for local communities.
In a report from the event, WorldFish scientist Dr. Jharendu Pant stressed the important role of fish in human nutrition and health and its potential for addressing problems of micronutrient and vitamin deficiencies, which are common in many of the country’s women and children.
Held on 5 March, the Aquaculture for Food Security and Nutrition workshop was organized by WorldFish, together with the Government of Timor-Leste and the European Commission Food Security Coordination Group. The event was followed by a three-day training program to give practical guidance on how to tap the potential of aquaculture for better nutrition.
Good food is safe food
Food safety is key to good nutrition and that means sound practices from production to consumption. A two-pronged project involving WorldFish together with CGIAR research partner the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is working to find out more about safety and nutrition in food value chains.
The Rapid Integrated Assessment project has brought together an international team of food safety and policy experts from WorldFish, ILRI, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – all members of the CGIAR Consortium – and other organizations to develop a toolkit for assessing the health and safety of a range of food chains in six countries. The second part of the project puts this toolkit into practice, to appraise the farmed tilapia value chain in Egypt, the milk value chain in Tanzania, the goat value chain in Ethiopia and pig value chains in Uganda and Vietnam. The toolkit examines the safety and nutritional value of the food at each link in the chain.
Livestock can make an important contribution to improved nutrition. But calls for more efficient ways of producing livestock – and hence protein to meet growing demand – have come from several scientists at ILRI.
The challenge is especially urgent in the light of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) caused by livestock rearing. In a blog posted by the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) on improved livestock productivity, Iain Wright, Director of the People, Livestock and Environment theme at ILRI, speaks of the many trade-offs in Africa, between livestock and the environment. ILRI is currently working with CCAFS to help researchers in East Africa measure GHG emissions resulting from agricultural activities and identify mitigation options.
Adapting to climate change
Protein-rich crops that are resistant to drought are a valuable source of nutrition and two CGIAR Research Centers are finding ways of producing better, more productive varieties in difficult conditions.
From the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT, a member of the CGIAR Consortium), comes news of an ambitious pigeonpea molecular breeding project, aimed at improving the food, nutrition and income security of millions of poor people in drylands. The Pigeonpea Improvement using Molecular Breeding project will help pigeonpea breeders to develop improved cultivars more efficiently, using genomic tools.
Meanwhile, in Burkina Faso, two new early maturing varieties of cowpea are helping farmers to combat malnutrition in spite of climate change. A blog from CGIAR Consortium member the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) describes how the two improved cowpea varieties are offering prospects of better nutrition, as well as boosting incomes for farmers. The varieties are high yielding, rich in protein, and resistant to the parasitic Striga weed. They grow well in areas of low rainfall, helping producers to combat the effect of drought and local communities to have nutritious food supplies, when other crops fail.
Nutrition and the international development agenda
Next week sees the Dublin Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Climate Justice take place where key policy makers and global thought leaders will meet with farmers and practitioners from developing countries facing the realities of undernutrition, as well as other topics such as rising food prices and failed crops. The event has been coorganised by CCAFS, Irish Aid, the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, and the World Food Programme. The objective will be to learn from practical experience and robust evidence to inform new approaches to addressing hunger, nutrition and climate justice.
More information:
Dublin Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Climate Justice (CCAFS)
CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)
Improving science in Africa key to implement mitigation strategies for livestock (CCAFS)
USAID-supported project to apply genomics research to pigeonpea improvement (ICRISAT)
Farmers in Burkina Faso get IITA improved cowpea varieties (IITA)
Fish for nutrition highlighted at Timor-Leste conference (WorldFish)
Healthy links: assessing food safety throughout the value chain (WorldFish)
HarvestPlus (A CGIAR Challenge Program)
Changing agricultural research in a changing world(CGIAR Strategy and Results Framework – SRF)
PHOTO credit: WorldFish