Meeting the new imperative of nutritional security

Last week I attended the second of three seminars on the links between nutrition and food security, organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture and Food for Development. An earlier meeting was blogged by Sir Gordon Conway – the final session, on Home Grown Nutrition, is being held in Westminster on December 18^th.

 This seminar series is another piece of evidence showing the increasing importance being given to nutrition when food security is considered. In the past, the focus was on ensuring that people had enough to eat – usually in the form of cereals and often supplied as emergency relief in famines such as that in Ethiopia in the 1980s. More recently, it has been realised that it is not just energy that is important, but that many millions of people in developing countries, particularly children,  are missing out on essential micronutrients – amino acids, minerals and vitamins – as a consequence of a diet largely restricted to carbohydrate and lacking in particular in fresh fruit and vegetables. The result is that population health in general is poor. For children the consequences are stunting and reduced brain development, problems that will continue throughout life and which will affect not only the individuals concerned but also the economies of their countries, as they will be less productive over their (shortened) working lives.

Despite the increasing realisation of its importance, nutritional security until now has been largely invisible. For example, many countries’ poverty reduction strategies or development plans do not even mention it.

How is this to be addressed? There are I think two routes – the high-tech and the low-tech. The high- tech, as adopted by the Harvest Plus programme of the CG system, involves breeding crops with additional, or higher than usual levels of, micronutrients, so-called biofortification. Examples include Quality Protein Maize (QPM) with added tryptophan and niacin, orange-fleshed sweet potato with added beta-carotene, beans with added iron, or perhaps the best known, golden rice and golden bananas (plantains). Although biofortification is said to be cost-effective, the potential danger with the approach is that plant breeders will simply add these traits to existing crop varieties without considering what else smallholder farmers consider when deciding what variety to grow. It is possible that, if they do not mature at the right time to suit the farming system, or they take too long to cook (using extra fuel), or they don’t taste as good, then they will not be grown. This is what happened with many of the high-yielding cereal varieties developed during the Green Revolution – they were not adopted by poor marginal farmers as they were not suitable for their circumstances or for their environments.

Post-harvest assessment of Ashoka rice with Indian farmers. Photo: Prof John Witcombe

The other route is to work directly with the smallholders for whom these crops are intended – finding out what traits they (especially women)regard as important in a variety and then breeding in the micronutrients without losing the other important characteristics. This could be highly effective. For example, by working directly with farmers we have developed and spread two new rice varieties, the Ashoka varieties, to at least half a million households in India. Although these do not contain added micronutrients, farmers tell us they give an earlier harvest, better eating quality, reduced cooking time and a higher market price. They also increase rice self sufficiency by 1-2 months (about 20%).

In combination with both these, it will be vital to encourage crop diversification, in particular through growing vegetables in home gardens in rural and peri-urban areas, as this will have a direct impact on nutritional security. This is something I will return to later.