Biofortification: Future Challenges for a Newly Emerging Technology to Improve Nutrition Security Sustainably
23 January 2025, Washington: Twenty years ago, biofortification was an unproven approach to reducing mineral and vitamin deficiencies. Today, an estimated 330 million people globally are eating biofortified foods.
This is a synopsis of a comprehensive review of the progress of biofortification recently published titled “Biofortification: Future Challenges for a Newly Emerging Technology to Improve Nutrition Security Sustainably”. It sets out the rationale for biofortification and documents the progress achieved in biofortification over the past 20 years. It also looks forward, laying out future challenges for biofortification and taking the perspective that twenty years is a brief time span in the development and deployment of an ever-evolving novel agricultural innovation that requires co-participation of the public, private, and non-governmental organization sectors.
“Let Plants Do the Work”: The Rationale for Biofortification
To stimulate investment and belief in biofortification, it needed to be shown that biofortification could be more cost-effective than the standard approaches of supplementation and commercial fortification for reducing hidden hunger among malnourished populations in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
This cost-effectiveness was established through the publication of several benefit-cost analyses, built on the concept of “letting the plants do the work.” Biofortification avoids the recurrent annual costs of supplementation and commercial fortification through breeding high-yielding, nutritious crops at central locations and making the productive and nutritious germplasm available to national agricultural research systems all over the world.
Successful effectiveness trials (studies evaluating the impacts of interventions under real world circumstances) for vitamin A orange sweet potato in Mozambique and Uganda provided further substantiation for the cost-effectiveness of biofortification.
New multi-country evidence is available on the dietary patterns that underpin the following assumptions made in the benefit-cost analyses above:
1. The quantity of staple foods eaten by people living in LMICs is constant across income groups.
This pattern was established more than 20 years ago; now, new data are presented for mothers and their pre-school children (based on intra-household intake) for seven countries which confirm this pattern. As income increases, demand for meat and fish products rises most rapidly, while demand for vegetables and fruits also increases, but at a slower pace.
2. Food staples provide a substantial base of mineral and vitamin intakes in LMICs.
The contribution of food staples like maize, wheat, and rice to mineral and vitamin intakes can be calculated based on the quantity of these eaten times their mineral and vitamin density. Using the Nutrient Balance Sheet data set, it is shown that for food staples in Africa and Asia, the primary staples provide a very significant proportion of the total intake (>50% in most instances) of iron, zinc, thiamine (vitamin B1), niacin (vitamin B3), pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), vitamin B6, copper, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and selenium (and important quantities of riboflavin (vitamin B2), folate, calcium, and potassium). Moreover, they contribute substantially at absolute levels to vitamin and mineral requirements. The percentage contributions of these nutrients are lower (but still quite significant) in Latin America, where incomes are higher and diets are more diversified. By contrast, in all three regions, staple foods do not contribute significantly to the intakes of vitamins A, C, D, E, and K, with the exception of vitamin C in cassava.
Historical plant breeding efforts for food staples that focused on yield (and not nutrient content) led to significant declines in nutrient density. Moreover, densities are expected to decline further with climate change as CO2 levels rise.
Progress Over the Past 20 Years
HarvestPlus initiated activities on biofortification in 2003 at a time when there was much skepticism about whether biofortification would work.
Nutritionists asked: Would the extra minerals and vitamins in biofortified foods have a public health impact? Plant breeders wondered: Could nutrient density be combined with high yields, so biofortified staple crops would be attractive to farmers and biofortified staple foods would sell for the same price as non-biofortified foods? Funders and policy makers questioned: Would farmers adopt biofortified varieties and would consumers buy them, especially if biofortification resulted in noticeable differences such as changes in taste and color?
Studies show that increases in intake of iron, zinc, and vitamin A from eating biofortified foods results in significant improvements in nutrition and health for women, adolescents, and children.
To address the first question, published efficacy studies have evaluated not only nutritional outcomes but also functional health outcomes. Studies show that increases in intake of iron, zinc, and vitamin A from eating biofortified foods results in significant improvements in nutrition and health for women, adolescents, and children. Moreover, these studies have transformed our understanding of the contributions that minerals and vitamins in food staples can make to micronutrient status. For iron in particular, findings have countered concerns from short-term studies that bioavailability would be as low as 1% to 2% due to the high phytate content of staple foods. Studies demonstrated that the bioavailability of iron in iron-biofortified crops ranged from 5% to 9.2%. In biofortified staple foods, provitamin A (a precursor to vitamin A) have converted much more efficiently to retinol (the biologically active form of vitamin A) than originally anticipated. The provitamin A to vitamin A equivalency ratio is 4:1 for provitamin A cassava and 3:1–7:1 for provitamin A maize, compared to a range of 10–80:1 for vegetables.
Given this body of evidence, global public health and nutrition bodies endorse biofortification as an efficacious intervention to improve nutrition.
With respect to the question of combining high yield with nutrient density, crop core collections in CGIAR Center germplasm banks along with breeding program materials were screened for variation in nutrient density. Based on the findings and given the target of adding 30-40% of the Estimated Average Requirement, single nutrients were identified for several crops that gave the highest probability of success. In this process, crop breeders transferred otherwise untapped trait variations from underutilized plant varieties and landraces, increasing genetic biodiversity.
By 2024, nearly 450 biofortified varieties of 12 crops had been released in 41 countries and were in testing for release in an additional 22 countries. Biofortified crops are approved for release by national agricultural research systems based on their proven ability to meet agronomic standards. Nonetheless, the misconception is still held that biofortification imparts a yield penalty.
Whether biofortified crops would be accepted by farmers and consumers and adopted by policymakers has been tested through focused scale-up activities in 13 countries in Africa and Asia that started in 2010. Iron beans, vitamin A cassava, vitamin A maize, and vitamin A orange sweet potato have had primary impacts in Africa, while zinc rice, zinc wheat, and iron pearl millet have had primary impacts in Asia. HarvestPlus has monitored and modeled the uptake of biofortified crops in these 13 countries using the Global Households Reached Projections Model. Projections of numbers of on-farm and off-farm consumers show over 330 million people are eating biofortified foods as of 2023.
The best documented impact is for iron beans in Rwanda where HarvestPlus undertook a nationally representative survey of bean-producing households. Yields of biofortified beans were estimated to be 23% higher for bush beans and 20% higher for climbing beans as compared with non-biofortified bean varieties. In Pakistan, a zinc wheat variety, Akbar 19, is fast becoming the most widely grown variety due to its superior yield and tolerance to heat stress. There is evidence to suggest that Akbar 19 already accounts for 50% of wheat production in Pakistan, serving well over 100 million consumers.
Iron and zinc are invisible micronutrients that do not affect taste when added to crops, whereas provitamin A adds a natural yellow or orange pigment color when added to food. In Nigeria, millions of farm households have adopted production of vitamin A (yellow) cassava and vitamin A (orange) maize—a change in staple crop color has not been a barrier to adoption. There is extensive literature on willingness to pay for nutrient-dense crops with or without information explaining the color change.
The United Nations agencies have integrated biofortification in their recommendations and programs. The Food and Agricultural Organization considers biofortification a complementary intervention that can improve micronutrient intake and contribute to healthy diets; World Health Organization recognizes biofortification as a sustainable strategy to be included in country’s food and nutrition programs; and the 2021 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report supports biofortification to improve nutrient availability. Through declarations approved by the Heads of States, the African Union has recognized the potential impact of biofortification across the continent to support their nutrition and agricultural strategies.
In addition, several international financial institutions now have nutrition targets for their loans to the agriculture sector, and they consider biofortification as a cost-effective and readily implementable technology that requires minimum behavior change and infrastructural investment. A number of countries are pursuing strategies to incorporate biofortified foods into school feeding programs, generally pursuing virtuous circles of local production and procurement.
As biofortification has become more widely accepted and has had impact, criticisms of it have emerged, often seemingly with the objective of promoting increased consumption of vegetables and fruits and more diversified agricultural production systems. Biofortification is not a ‘silver bullet’; there is no single strategy that can provide everyone in need with an affordable, diverse, and healthy diet. A range of complementary, context-specific, and evidence-based interventions—including dietary diversification and biofortification, among others—need to be encouraged and funded to combat hidden hunger. Even if per capita food staple consumption were to decline somewhat in the future, it remains beneficial—especially for the poor whose diets are dominated by food staples—for these food staples to be as nutritious as possible.
Future Challenges
During the first 15+ years of spearheading biofortification at HarvestPlus, there was a unique opportunity to collect an increasing amount of funding in a central location and to distribute these funds strategically as required for research and deployment across several crops and disciplines. Today that management structure has disappeared. Funding has declined very significantly and is directed by various donors to specific crop-discipline activities (e.g., breeding for zinc wheat at CIMMYT; orange maize deployment in Malawi). Individual actors are expected to coordinate without funding to support this coordination.
Reaching a Higher Impact Trajectory
Several opportunities exist for biofortification to continue on its current scaling trajectory. To advance to a much higher impact trajectory—that is, to bring benefits to exponentially more such people who need more nutrients in their diets—advanced agricultural crop development techniques have emerged on a breathtaking scale that can be put into action.
Along the current trajectory, while progress has been made over the last 20 years to link agriculture and nutrition, it remains an uphill battle to convince agricultural policymakers and agricultural donors to give priority to nutrition objectives. A part of the problem is, of course, lack of training and knowledge about nutrition issues. Although generally very cost-effective, agricultural interventions have long gestation periods. Decision-makers today may not be around to see the eventual long-term, larger impacts. Biofortification activities may lose their novelty over a number of years, even though regular sustained investments are key. In any event, the current decline in funding for biofortification has seriously threatened the continued flow of improved biofortified varieties coming out of breeding pipelines. A key for increased investments by private seed companies in biofortification is to promote consumer demand. For the vitamin A-enriched varieties, the change in color has been seen to become an effective tool for marketing.
To date, HarvestPlus has focused on adding iron, zinc, and vitamin A into staple crops. To move to a higher trajectory of impact in the future, additional minerals, vitamins, and compounds that are essential for diets and/or can promote the bioavailability of essential nutrients should be considered as part of any biofortification program. The key to handling the complexity of multiple traits simultaneously is application of transgenic, gene-editing, and other newly emerging technologies. Disproven fears of their safety are holding back progress due to the politicization of the regulatory process. For example, it is not widely known that in contained field trials with high-yielding backgrounds, Golden Rice now has high levels of vitamin A and zinc and iron—simultaneously providing more of the three micronutrients that are most deficient in diets. Substituting this Golden Rice “Plus” one-for-one with the rice presently consumed in the Philippines, would double the vitamin A intakes of the poorest two deciles of the population, and on average for the entire population; zinc intakes would be more than doubled and iron intakes would increase by 25%—at no extra cost to family food budgets.
The Best is Yet to Come
Biofortified crops are being produced and consumed globally in more than 40 countries, an effort achieved through twenty years of investment in the HarvestPlus program and wide collaborations across CGIAR, including efforts by the International Potato Center for vitamin A orange sweet potato. Biofortified crops have been shown to be efficacious in multiple published randomized controlled trials, and biofortification is widely recognized by the international nutrition community as one effective approach, among several that are needed, to reduce mineral and vitamin deficiencies. This is a promising start.
Biofortification is at the forefront of demonstrating just how resilient, sustainable, and cost-effective agricultural interventions can be for improving nutrition and health.
Biofortification is at the forefront of demonstrating just how resilient, sustainable, and cost-effective agricultural interventions can be for improving nutrition and health. Although substantial progress has been made, biofortification is not yet tightly woven into the fabric of present-day food systems as a core activity of a number of institutions. To continue progress along the same trajectory, it is necessary that sustained funding continues over the longer-term to further develop and improve nutrient densities in plant breeding pipelines.
To move to a higher trajectory, the impacts of biofortification can be multiplied several-fold through the use of genetic engineering and other advanced crop development techniques. Technological change with greater productivity is a natural progression in many sectors. In nutrition, multiple micronutrient supplementation is replacing iron-folic acid; great strides have been made in providing multiple micronutrients through large-scale food fortification. It is in this sense, then, that biofortification is a proven, but “newly emerging” technology. The best is yet to come.
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