Ithaca, New York
November 4, 2024
Women in southern India sort biofortified orange sweet potatoes. - Erick Boy/HarvestPlus
A series of research papers and a free online data dashboard seek to boost the use of biofortification – an affordable, sustainable and climate-smart way to address global malnutrition by increasing the concentrations of essential nutrients in staple crops.
The most recent paper, published in Nutrition Research Reviews, is a systematic review of the facilitators of and barriers to adoption of biofortified crops. The team found that the crop production and nutrition benefits of biofortified crops facilitated adoption, especially when farmers knew about those relative advantages compared to traditional varieties.
“What is the impact of biofortified foods and food products?” said Samantha Huey, Ph.D. ’20, a research associate in the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and project lead under the supervision of Dr. Saurabh Mehta, the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor Division of Nutritional Sciences. Mehta is the center’s founding director and the principal investigator on this research grant.
“Once we started unpacking it,” Huey said, “we realized there were so many ways to approach that question – from the level of examining crop variety-specific micronutrient retention to a more macro lens of examining the impact pathways by which biofortified crops can reach different consumer groups.”
To make this information easily accessible, Jesse Krisher, a database developer on the team, created a dashboard, along with Mehta and Huey, to present complex information in a searchable online format. This was featured in a Nature Food article by the team.
Micronutrient deficiencies – inadequate intake of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin A, iron and zinc – affect roughly 2 billion people, especially children and women of reproductive age in low-income countries. Recent papers have highlighted how most of the world’s population doesn’t consume enough key micronutrients. Food-based approaches are necessary for dietary diversity and to complement other efforts to prevent micronutrient deficiency.
Biofortification can address the problem through existing food systems – if farmers grow the new varieties and consumers choose to eat them.
Huey is the co-lead author with Saiful Islam, M.S. ’23, of the latest review, which applied an implementation science framework to the facilitators and barriers to adoption of biofortified foods and food products. The team reviewed 41 studies, 28 of which focused on orange sweet potato. One of the first biofortified crops developed, it contains more beta carotene, a precursor to vitamin A, than yellow and white sweet potato varieties.
Vitamin A deficiency leads to vision loss, increased susceptibility to illness, growth issues and even death. It’s especially prevalent among children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, regions where sweet potato is a staple crop. In addition to its extra carotenoids, orange sweet potato is adaptable to a wider range of climate conditions, takes less effort to grow than other varieties and has high “sensory acceptability” – it looks and tastes good.
The other studies addressed vitamin A cassava, high-iron beans and vitamin A maize.
The team found that the crop production and nutrition benefits of biofortified crops made it more likely they’d be adopted, especially when farmers knew about those advantages. Barriers to adoption included production, storage and processing issues stemming from local conditions, as well as farmers not having enough information about how to grow and process the crops.
They found that individual characteristics like capability, opportunity and motivation mattered in addition to implementation processes, noting that policymakers and organizations looking to promote biofortification need to understand the characteristics and preferences of receivers and deliverers of interventions before their delivery.
The researchers argued that future studies on adoption of biofortified crops should consider the stages of adoption and identify the determinants across these stages. They also called for more research on understudied regions and crops, such as vitamin A maize.
This suite of reviews represents a collaborative effort between Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health. Past reviews looked at the impact of the consumption of biofortified crops and food products, based on: the pathways through which the foods are consumed (for example, processed by manufacturers and purchased by consumers, given to consumers through formal programs, or grown and consumed at home); the bioaccessibility and bioavailability of the food and food products; their sensory acceptability; and how they retain the micronutrients depending on storage and preparation methods.
“With systematic reviews, you’re reviewing all the available evidence,” Huey said. “There’s no cherry-picking studies where the result sounds better than maybe another study.”
Like the other reviews, the latest paper is published in an open-source online journal.
“A big part of the Jacobs Center’s mission is to get critical information and data across the last mile – i.e., making the information more accessible to people who will actually be implementing it,” Huey said. “These reviews show that biofortified crops have a lot of promise as a sustainable climate-smart intervention to address population-level micronutrient deficiency, but in order to do that, understanding factors related to implementation in particular setting is key.”
Funding for this suite of reviews was from German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Commercialisation of Biofortified Crops, a program co-led by GAIN and HarvestPlus.
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