At your kirana shop soon: Zinc-rich rice, wheat

If efforts of scientists and global organisation working on nutritional health yield results, you will soon be able to buy zinc-rich rice or wheat or even iron-rich millet or maize (corn).

India is looking at the option of administering nutrition through crops, especially when millions of children in the country are suffering from malnutrition and under-nourishment.

According to MS Swaminathan, Director of MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, India tops globally in the number of children whose growth has been stunted.

“Growth of 61.7 million children has been stunted in India,” he told the second global conference on Biofortification in Kigali, Rwanda, recently.

The seriousness of the Indian situation can be gauged from the fact that Nigeria is a distant second with growth of 11 million children stunted.

According to Chris Elias, President, Global Development Programmes, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, India has endorsed the use of nutrient-rich crops.

Commercial use “It allocated about $40 million to develop and promote commercial cultivation and the supply chain of nutrient-rich products for vulnerable segments of the population,” he told the conference.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has taken up the initiative of bio-fortifying seven food crops, including wheat, rice, pearl millet and maize, through its initiative HarvestPlus.

Cultivation of iron-rich peal millet was commercialised in India in 2012 and a few hundred acres have been brought under the crop.

Next on cards is zinc-rich rice. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute has developed such a variety and released it last year. According to the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute, it is leading a collaborative project to develop high-zinc rice for release in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

This will be followed by efforts to release zinc-rich wheat in India and Pakistan.

According to Nirmal Seeds, the Indian firm which is working in Africa in development of iron-rich pearl millet, it is engaged in developing high zinc wheat in India.

No GM crops The bio-fortified grains will cost only as much as normal grain varieties in retail outlets.

“These varieties are high-yielding. The price of nutritious staple grains in retail markets will be equal to the price of today’s lower-nutrient staple grain varieties,” said Howarth Bouis, Director of HarvestPlus.

All bio-fortified crops are developed through conventional plant breeding. This means no genetic modification has been done. “Development of these varieties through plant breeding has relied on the natural variation found in plant varieties collected throughout the world and then preserved in central seed banks,” Bouis said.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Elias said that the early success with Vitamin A or orange sweet potato has encouraged work on other crops and micro-nutrients.

Partnering farmers Last year, HarvestPlus reached over 1.3 million farmers in seven countries, including India, and by the year-end, the number will top 2.3 million.

Efforts are on to develop high-micronutrient varieties of cassava and beans too.

In less than three decades, zinc-fortified rice in Bangladesh and India can reduce the zinc deficiency among children under 5 by more than 85 per cent, says Elias.

Action is also being taken through the Codex Alimentarius to develop biofortification guidelines, which are essential to national and international adoption and commercialisation.

Swaminathan says that moringa (drumstick), sweet potato, nutritious millets besides fruits and vegetables should be cultivated and consumed in India to overcome malnutrition and under-nourishment.

“We need to introduce agricultural remedies for nutrition maladies. The nutrition-farm movement should be popularised,” he says.

HarvestPlus targets to reach at least one billion farmers to grow bio-fortified crops in the next 15 years, a roadmap that was approved by the conference.

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