Can The B-Word Beat Malnutrition?

While fortifying staple foods, such as wheat flour and salt, has become routine in urban parts of malnutrition-prone West Africa, bio-fortification - the breeding of more nutritious vegetables, grains and pulses - is still a relatively new phenomenon for the region, but it is set to explode over the next decade, say food security experts.The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) houses HarvestPlus,a programme that breeds varieties of sweet potato, cassava, plantain, corn, rice and other staples enriched with vitamin A, zinc and iron - the nutrients that the World Health Organization says people in developing countries are most deficient in.

Projects using these plants to tackle malnutrition are taking place across Asia and in Africa, including Mozambique and Uganda.

In Senegal, food security NGO Yaajeende, supported by USAID, has teamed up with HarvestPlus to re-introduce the vitamin A-rich orange-flesh sweet potato to the country (it died out for reasons that remain unclear) and to replace the currently used millet seed with iron-enriched pearl millet. Eventually, they hope to introduce zinc-enriched rice and vitamin A-enriched orange corn. "We want to reach a point where you see more orange sweet potato than any other kind in Senegal," Todd Crosby, head of Yaajeende, told IRIN.

He added, "We hope to have replaced existing millet seed with bio-fortified millet by our project's end," in five to 10 years' time. Bio-fortification technology was introduced to Africa several years ago, but take-up is expected to accelerate, with the involvement of not just governments, research institutes and nonprofits, but huge multinational corporations as well. Nestlé, for example, has long worked in micro-nutrient fortification and is now embracing bio-fortification, with plans to integrate vitamin A-enriched cassava and iron- and zinc-enriched rice varieties from Nigeria and Madagascar, respectively, into its future product lines.In 2008, the Copenhagen Consensus identified bio-fortification as one of its top five solutions to global development challenges. Nutrient deficiencies According to IFRPRI's Global Hidden Hunger index, released in June 2013, 18 of the 20 countries with the highest micronutrient deficiency rates are in sub-Saharan Africa.