Group Seeks Funding For Biofortification To Halt Micronutrients Deficiency

A global movement to rapidly scale up the production and consumption of biofortified staple crops and foods, Harvest Plus, has called on the government at all levels to fund the effective implementation of various programmes aimed at addressing micronutrient deficiency in the country.

Through a crop breeding process called biofortification, micronutrient-enriched, climate-smart varieties of common staples provide essential iron, zinc, and vitamin A to rural households to improve nutritional status, health, and livelihoods.

Addressing journalists on the sidelines of the Biofortification policy roundtable in Abuja on Monday, Harvest Plus Country Manager, Nigeria, Yusuf Dollah Fu’ad, said deficiencies in micronutrients account for the majority of the global health burden from hidden hunger affecting more than two billion people, mostly in low and middle-income countries.

Lamenting that Nigerians has nutritional challenges, he said biofortification has been in Nigeria for 10 years now.

“What we are doing today is to stress the need for policymakers to see the need for budgetary allocation to seed production, saying in the past three years it is either growing or shrinking.

“If it is growing, we can ask the government to do more because we need to create access so that every man, woman, and child in the rural community should able to have access,” he said.

On the goal of Harvest Plus in Nigeria, the head of National Policy, Rewa Misrad, said the organisation wanted to eradicate hidden hunger in Nigeria.

“We also want women, men, and children who have been suffering from micronutrient deficiencies for years be to live a good life,” she said.

The director, Macro Nutrient Deficiency Control, Federal Ministry of Health, Uruakpa John, said the government has been very positive on biofortification not just within Nigeria but globally, adding that there has been increased recognition by policymakers that biofortification is an important solution.

On links between biofortification and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), he clarified that biofortification has been developed through conventional breeding and there are no links between GMOs and biofortification.