Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
problem—micronutrient deficiencies are nevertheless often regarded primarily as
health problems. Indicative of this view is that the World Health Organization has a
dedicated section on micronutrient deficiencies on its website (WHO 2011f ). In this
context, the most common approaches to control vitamin and mineral deficiencies
are fortification or supplementation (e.g., WHO 2011f; UNICEF 2011; Micronutrient
Initiative 2011b; GAIN 2011). In addition to these interventions, and as micronutrient
malnutrition persists, a complementary approach has emerged: breeding staple food
crops for higher micronutrient content. Given that micronutrient deficiencies are
essentially a food-based problem, the idea of adding to people's food what is lacking in
their diets is not new; this is already being done through fortification. However, using
plants to fortify themselves with micronutrients had not been pursued as a coherent
strategy to tackle vitamin and mineral deficiencies on a broader front until the late
1990s, when, inter alia, the “Micronutrients Project” of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research was initiated (Bouis et al. 2000).1 Only a little
later the term “biofortification” was coined to describe micronutrient fortification
of plants through breeding approaches (CGIAR 2002), and the concept was intro-
duced in the literature (e.g., Bouis et al. 2000; Welch and Graham 2000; Bouis 2002).
Moreover, given that one of the first biofortified crops—Golden Rice—reached the
headlines because it was genetically engineered (see Nash 2000), and given the politi-
cal and social controversies surrounding this technology, it is pertinent to have a more
detailed look at biofortification and how and where this concept overlaps with geneti-
cally modified crops.
Micronutrient Malnutrition
Each year the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations publishes its
estimates of the number of undernourished people in the world, which over the last
forty years oscillated around 900 million people (FAO 2010). Over the same period
the world population was continuously increasing, which means that the share of
hungry people has fallen over the last four decades. Even so, about one in seven peo-
ple still suffer from a lack of food, so that fighting hunger continues to be a challenge
for humanity. On the other hand, the World Health Organization estimates that,
worldwide, 1.5 billion people are overweight (WHO 2011g). Increasingly, these two
forms of malnutrition, underweight and overweight, are occurring simultaneously
within the same societies or even within the same households (Gillespie and Haddad
2003; FAO 2006).
Adding to this, estimates indicate that 2 billion people worldwide are anemic, many
due to iron deficiency (WHO 2011c). A further 2 billion people likely have insufficient
iodine intakes (de Benoist et al. 2008), and a similar number (1.2 to 2 billion people) are
affected by zinc deficiency (Hotz and Brown 2004; WHO 2002). Moreover, at least half
a billion people are estimated to suffer from selenium deficiency (Combs 2001), and an
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