Grants to fight malnutrition

Cash boost should help, bring fortified rice and manioc in the market.Golden rice (right) offers more vitamin A than normal Reis.International Rice Research Institute

Gates Foundation is almost $ 20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda always nutritionally improved rice and cassava are issued on the market and decreasing malnutrition in Asia and Africa.

The grants will help in the development, testing and marketing of golden rice, which is fortified with vitamin A, the Philippines and Bangladesh and BioCassava plus, fastened to a bulb with vitamin A, iron, and protein in Kenya and Nigeria.

In the rich countries, people have usually access to a varied diet and food which has been fortified with various essential nutrients, but these elements are often unaffordable or inaccessible in the developing countries.

People in poor countries, mainly farmers, have to often only access what they grow. In parts of Asia people rely, on rice, for 50-80% of their daily calories, and approximately 70 million Africans rely on cassava. It is no wonder that vitamin and mineral deficiencies worldwide concern over two billion people, and to about 7% of deaths and 10% of the burden of disease in low-income countries, according to Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas, Coordinator of the micro-nutrients unit at the WHO in Geneva beitragenSchweiz.

Biofortified or nutritionally enhanced staple could reap thus significantly the death and disease reduce burden related to malnutrition, Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington according to Lawrence Kent, head of development of at the Bill & Melinda agriculture. Several research groups working on fortified varieties of bean, rice, corn, sweet potato, cowpea, peanut, wheat, pumpkin and bananas.

"I am optimistic that Biofortification can help to improve the health of people and because we use sustainable food, already growing people," says Kent.

Attached plants can be either through conventional plant breeding or biotechnology to be genome and increase your diet, said Pena-Rosas.

The company HarvestPlus in Washington DC, the orange sweet potato with 50% of the daily vitamin A requirement in Uganda and Mozambique in 2007 published, used traditional breeding techniques. Golden rice and BioCassava plus are genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and have attracted their fair share of negative attention from the anti-GMO lobby. "Everything which includes biotechnology includes a level of controversy," explains Kent. "But we need to open and data-related."

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The Gates Foundation grants rice and BioCassava plus food safety and environmental policy helps the data for Golden meet generate. "These crops not used farmers and consumers, until they pass tests for bio-safety in every country", says Gerard Barry, of the golden rice network on the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos in the Philippines coordinated.

Golden rice expected regulatory approvals obtained in the Philippines in 2013 and in Bangladesh in the year 2015, according to Ingo Potrykus, a former geneticist at the Institute of the rice plant sciences in Zurich, Switzerland, and one of the inventors. BioCassava follow plus a few years later the team hopes for approval until 2017, according to Martin Fregene, a plant geneticist and Director of BioCassava plus programme, based in St. Louis, Missouri.

"As long as we can show that [these products] added value and are sure there are no mother, who do not want they would use to the health of their children, increase", says Fregene.

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