July 2007

Safe and Healthy Dryland Foods

           
Since the 1960s, the spectre of looming mass famines galvanized the world to focus intently on multiplying the quantities of food grown in the developing world, with less attention to quality. While stunningly successful, a pernicious ‘hidden hunger’ continued to persecute the poor.

The poor have difficulty affording the varied and balanced diets they need for robust health. Many just scrape by on porridge made from low-quality grain. Besides supplying insufficient amounts of minerals and vitamins, the cheapest grades are all too often contaminated with cancer-causing toxins.

The scourges of hidden hunger and invisible toxins

The World Health Organization and other bodies estimate that anemia caused by iron deficiency affects over two billion people worldwide, including most poor women; that zinc deficiency, which causes stunting and morbidity affects three-quarters or more of those in Asia and Africa; and vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness, growth retardation and disease susceptibility damages one-third of the developing world population. ‘Aflatoxins’ are toxic chemicals produced by certain fungi that infect plant foods, reducing human immune system function when consumed and causing stunting, liver cirrhosis and cancer.

The mind-boggling scale and human cost of hidden hunger and invisible toxins compels urgent attention from the world community. While a root cause of the problem is poverty (inability to purchase better, more diverse foods), hidden hunger and toxicity are also a cause of that poverty because they reduce human potential. We need to break this vicious cycle by tackling malnutrition head-on.

 

Super-charged cereals

Hidden hunger has recently attracted justifiable and much-needed attention from the global development community. To breed higher nutrient levels in our mandate crops, especially the dryland cereals sorghum and millet, we participate in two major global research initiatives:

• HarvestPlus, a CGIAR Challenge Programme supported by a consortium of donors; and
   
• The Africa Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) project, a consortium of seven African and two American institutions funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health program.

Begun only recently, this work has already discovered lines in ICRISAT’s gene bank that have iron and zinc concentrations up to four times higher than in widely-grown varieties. It remains to be seen whether these high nutrient densities (concentrations) can be maintained as these genes are bred into adapted genetic backgrounds, but such large-scale genetic variability suggests that significant gains may be possible. Soil type where the crop is grown also has a major effect; iron-rich soils lead to iron-rich grains.

 

The more, the better

Even under the constraints of dryland rainfed cereal farming, much can be done to add diversity to the diet while increasing incomes. High vitamin-A orange-fleshed sweet potato (developed by our sister center CIP) can be intercropped with rainfed sorghum; just 100 grams per day of this tasty crop meets the vitamin A need of young children. Orange-fleshed pumpkins are another option that can be planted in moist spots in the field, and have a long storage life.

Leafy indigenous vegetables such as Moringa leaves plucked from dryland trees in the Sahel have a 50-times higher pro-vitamin A concentration than millet grain. Other species often picked wild and consumed include Corchorus spp., Senna obtusifolia, Hibiscus sabdariffa and Adansonia digitata. When cultivated these crops are often high income earners, helping the poor fight poverty at the same time.

 

Toxic waste

Healthy foods also must be free of the aflatoxins that lay waste to human health. They are produced by the fungi Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus which infect many crops both in the field (often triggered by drought) and also in storage if they are not kept dry. Groundnut, sorghum, maize, spices, chili peppers, almonds, and pistachios are frequently contaminated. An integrated approach is most effective in controlling aflatoxin, including practices to avoid drought; biological control agents; fungicides; resistant varieties; timely harvesting and sorting to remove infected grains; and quick drying and dry storage of grains.

Besides harming human health in the developing world, strict limits on aflatoxin content make it difficult for many developing countries to export these crops to the developed world, cutting off income-earning opportunities. Monitoring aflatoxin contamination in food lots to certify safety can open doors to these export markets. ICRISAT developed a low-cost, highly accurate aflatoxin testing kit based on ELISA immunoabsorbent technology.

Utilizing this kit in an integrated market-chain approach, we are helping one of Africa’s poorest countries, Malawi, establish export markets to the European Union. First came the breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant ‘confectionary’ groundnuts suitable for that market, and working with the government and private sector to establish the necessary seed supply systems. We then helped the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi (NASFAM) introduce a food safety assurance protocol utilizing the testing kit to meet export standards. Third, we helped catalyze a NASFAM linkage to Fair Trade importers so that NASFAM farmers garner higher prices for their produce. This integrated market-chain approach is now expanding into Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya.

The interconnected web of food safety, human health, and prosperity

Hidden hunger and toxins extract an insidious toll on those who will make or break the future: youngsters and the young mothers who conceive and nurture them. By increasing food nutrient content, diversifying diets, reducing food safety hazards and increasing incomes, we can help the poor break loose from the bonds of malnutrition and toxins that prevent them from achieving their full potential.

These benefits are fundamental and long-lasting, and seem to us to be especially relevant to our aspiration to serve the world through ‘Science with a Human Face’.

 

Sincerely yours,

William D. Dar
Director General