HarvestPlus (Biofortification)

Updated Jun 11, 2020

HarvestPlus (Biofortification)

Part of HarvestPlus

http://www.harvestplus.org

Josephine Boyle

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HarvestPlus works to tackle hidden hunger, a lack of essential vitamins and minerals affecting 2 billion people globally, by breeding vitamins and minerals into everyday food crops using conventional breeding, a method called biofortification.

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HarvestPlus focuses on three crucial micronutrients that are most limited in the diets of the empoverished—vitamin A, zinc, and iron—and breeds these into key staplecrops that already make up the diets of our target beneficiaries. HarvestPlus screens thousands of different types of crop seeds stored in seed banks that have naturally higher amounts of these micronutrients, andour nutritional genomicists use tools such as marker-assisted selection to breed new, healthier crop varieties.
How does your innovation work?
Conventional plant breeding is not new—it began hundreds of years ago. Farmers have been altering the genetic makeup of the crops they grow for the past eight to ten thousand years—since the dawn of agriculture. Early farmers chose the best looking plants and seeds and saved them for next year’s planting. As the science of genetics became better understood, plant breeders were able to select certain desirable traits in a plant to create improved varieties of plants. HarvestPlus focuses on three crucial micronutrients that are most limited in the diets of the poor—vitamin A, zinc, and iron—and breed these into key staplecrops. HarvestPlus screens thousands of different types of crop seeds stored in seed banks that have naturally higher amounts of iron, zinc, and vitamin A. Our nutritional genomicists use tools such as marker-assisted selection to help speed up the breeding process. We use these more nutritious seeds to breed new crop varieties with higher micronutrient content that are also high yielding and have other traits farmers want. HarvestPlus, together with farmers, test these new varieties in the target region. We partner with farmers during the testing phase to ensure buy-in from the farming communities. We also conduct studies to ensure that these new crops have sufficient amounts of the nutrient needed to improve nutrition. The national government then officially releases the best-performing varieties of micronutrient-rich crops for farming communities to grow, eat, and sell in local markets.

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Stage 5: Scaling

HarvestPlus currently works with partners to scale access to biofortified crops and food in developing countries around the world. We plan to expand this to 30 target countries in all regions over the next several years, with the goal of reaching 1 billion people with biofortified crops by 2030. To-date, biofortified crops in general are either released (and/or available to farmers) or being tested/evaluated in a total of 46 countries globally, and are reaching over 42 million people.

Focus Areas:

Agriculture, Nutrition, Climate Change and Resilience and 3 MoreSEE ALL

Implemented In:

Uganda, Colombia, Bangladesh and 11 MoreSEE ALL

Countries Implemented In

38,009,745

Customers

157

Employees

Verified Funding

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Problem

Over two billion people globally suffer from chronic micronutrient deficiency. leading to blindness, stunting, cognitive impairment, preventable disease and death, and intergenerational poverty. Food systems that provide diverse diets are the ideal, but are often out of reach. Especially in poor or rural households, families lack access to interventions like supplements or fortification and rely on inexpensive staple foods, which will likely lose nutrient levels under climate change.

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Solution

With a breakthrough innovation by HarvestPlus, staple foods are enriched with vitamins and minerals through conventional plant breeding to provide a sustainable, farmer-controlled tool to fight malnutrition. Biofortified varieties are bred not only to meet farm household demands for yield, climate adaptability, processing/consumption attributes but also to provide over 50% of the daily requirement for vitamin A, iron and zinc for all household members who consume staple foods daily.

Target Beneficiaries

Biofortification was developed to help the over two billion people – the majority of whom are in rural areas of LMICs - who do not have sufficient micronutrients in their diets. Its comparative advantage is mainly in rural areas, where households tend to consume what they produce, and tend to have monotonous, staple food-based their diets, and where they are unlikely to be reached by supplementation and fortification and for whom dietary diversity may be out of reach. Biofortification was specifically developed to benefit the most vulnerable and to reach everyone in a household — since all household members tend to consume staple crops as their main, everyday source of food (unlike some other nutritious foods such as animal source foods which tend to be allocated to men and the boys in the household). The micronutrient targets for breeding biofortified varieties of crops are set to meet the micronutrient requirements of those who need them the most – women, children and adolescent girls – who tend to have the highest micronutrient needs for growth, development and good health (of this and future generations) and the lowest micronutrient intake due to cultural, social and economic reasons.

Mission and Vision

In 2018, thanks to extraordinary effort of HarvestPlus's partners, more than 38 million people were reached with nutritious biofortified crops. By more than doubling our target working countries, the projected impact will exponentially increase, creating a ripple effect of biofortified seed supply to connected markets in the region. By 2030, HarvestPlus hopes that over 1 billion people will benefit from biofortification. Through our work, HarvestPlus, in conjunction with IFPRI and the greater CGIAR system,also hopes to build up the agricultural research community at-large by producing greater impact data for a more robust evidence base.We are also working tirelessly to expand the community of seed producers, farmers, researchers, and suppliers, to create a more sustainable value chain in each country we work within.

Competitive Advantage

Biofortification is a unique agricultural innovation that impacts nutrition and subsequent health for such a low level of effort. Even behavior change is at a minimum, as biofortified crops do not disrupt the traditionalstaple diets of the beneficiary populations, but rather enhance the ingredients. Additionally, biofortified varieties are bred to maintain (or exceed) yield and hardiness when compared to baseline varieties in the same region.

Planned Goals and Milestones

In target countries— Uganda, Nigeria, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan— HarvestPlus works to ensure farmers not only grow the more nutritious food but consume it as well. Delivery managers work with national partners to register and release new micronutrient-rich crop varieties in target countries. We engage with seed and extension systems to ensure that the crops are widely available and promoted to farmers. Our teams include marketing experts and behavior change specialists who collaborate with local organizations and communities to educate consumers on the benefits of eating these new crops. These new varieties must satisfy consumer tastes and have enough micronutrients to reduce malnutrition among rural communities that will grow and eat these foods regularly. In most cases, these foods look and taste the same as the most commonly eaten variety. When there is a detectable change, as in the case of vitamin A-rich crops that tend to be yellow to orange in color, HarvestPlus and our partners educate consumers on the nutritional benefits of these new varieties and encourage people to make the switch. When eaten regularly, these micronutrient-rich foods work to contribute to body stores of micronutrients—reducing hidden hunger in malnourished communities. With this said, HarvestPlus is working with both public and private sector partners to increase the production of widely-adaptable biofortified seed to rural farmers in an expanded target demographic (30 countries globally). By drawing in multinational and local private producers and others along the value chain, the goal is to reduce HarvestPlus direct management by creating a sustainable system far beyond the life of any program. In the short term, under the larger target of reaching 1 billion people by 2030, HarvestPlus is focused on ramping up seed breeding and dissemination in the Asia region over the next several years.
The next steps for HarvestPlus is drawing in more investers to help scale biofortified crops in each of the regions where we work. Currently, demand outweights the supply of biofortified seed, so we are working with more suppliers and distributors to create a greater output for each market. Multilateral partnerships, particularly PPP's, need to be forged to ensure greater chances for sustainability in each system that we build. Ramping up advocacy for policy incorporation of biofortification, at the government-level, is also a key next step for our team.

The Team Behind the Innovation

HarvestPlus was created in 2003 as a joint venture of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and International Tropical Agriculture Center (CIAT). While legally and fiscally governed by IFPRI, HarvestPlus has a separate CEO, CFO and Program Advisory Committee. Deputy Directors oversee three functional units: 1) crop development/field operations; 2) nutrition/impact research and monitoring/evaluation (M&E); and 3) strategic partnerships, advocacy and fundraising. There are eight country programs—five in Africa and three in Asia—where the impact and reach of bio-fortified crops have been demonstrated, and delivery models assessed for cost and ability to reach vulnerable populations.