Advocacy for biofortification: Building stakeholder support, integration into regional and national policies, and sustaining momentum

Abstract

Africa as a continent faces high prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies such as vitamin A, iron, and zinc. Biofortification offers a dietary agriculture-based strategy that has shown potential to address selected micronutrient deficiencies. This chapter describes how advocacy for biofortification by HarvestPlus and its partners has been structured, including a mix of evidence generation and sharing, stakeholder mapping, promotion to change attitudes, and efforts towards establishing Codex Alimentarius standards for biofortification. In addition, a review of African Union, Southern African Development Community, and country-level strategic policy documents on how biofortification is reflected in such documents for four country case studies, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Zambia was conducted. The momentum that has been built for biofortification on the continent is in part attributed to salient advocacy that HarvestPlus and its partners have used to promote investment in biofortification and adoption by countries, to the extent that the original skepticism has dissipated and biofortified crops have been released in at least 22 African countries with plans for release in additional countries. Considerations and recommendations are suggested to inform the development of advocacy strategies at country, regional, and Africa continent levels, aimed at sustaining and accelerating the momentum for biofortification.

Mainstreaming of biofortification in the African Union: Evaluation of CGIAR contributions to a policy outcome trajectory

“…as one of the focus crops (Covic et al, 2017). This was the first time biofortification was called for in an AU document, albeit not by name.…”

“…By 2011, momentum for a nutrition focus within CAADP was growing. (Covic et al, 2017). Baskets (BNFB) project.…”

Staple Crops Biofortification Linking Agriculture, Food and Nutrition towards Eliminating Hidden Hunger

“…Biofortification requires high adoption by both farmers and community. Indeed, the visibility of traits and infrastructures are critical to technology adoption [59,60]. Biofortified crops with visible traits such as orange-fleshed sweet potatoes and golden rice requires that producers and consumer accept these changes in addition to claimed nutritional potentials [59].…”

“…So far, no accepted standards as per Codex Alimentarius for biofortified crops which is necessary for formal and legal integration into regulations to inform policy makers and provide directions for monitoring and evaluation [57,60,69]. Indeed, several questions for nutrients bioavailability and efficacy of biofortified crop are opening possibilities for further research [72,73].…”

Potential for quality protein maize for reducing proteinenergy undernutrition in maize dependent Sub-Saharan African countries: A review

“…Bio-fortification is relatively a new technology, which is being promoted worldwide to combat hidden hunger (undernutrition), which is as a result of most communities relying on staple foods, which lack some nutrients resulting in increased incidence of malnutrition (Machida et al, 2014). It has been scientifically reported that bio-fortification is feasible without compromising agronomic productivity for crops such as maize; with high protein quality and vitamin A, that is QPM and pro-vitamin A maize, respectively (Andersson et al, 2017;Covic et al, 2017;Potrykus, 2017); hence bio-fortification is the way to go. Bio-fortified crops such as QPM have been developed to fight the problem of PEU in maize dependent communities such as the SSA.…”