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Bioversity International is shaking up the food system says Food Tank
Bioversity International was mentioned by the Food Tank: The Food Think Tank as one of the 40 organizations that are shaking up the food system. "Our hope is that the more people know about the work that these groups are doing, the more people can be inspired to make their own change in the food system," said the co-founders of the blog.
Semantics for Biodiversity – International Workshop
The 1st international workshop on Web Semantics for Biodiversity, held on 27 May in Montpellier, France, will define key challenges identified by the bioinformatics community, discuss solutions and identify opportunities emerging from interactions across plant science and informatics disciplines.
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Global malnutrition - the context
Photo: J. Fanzo/Bioversity
An estimated 925 million people are hungry worldwide, and many more are malnourished.
Children are particularly vulnerable with 175 million children under five years of age stunted due to chronic malnourishment. 90% of these children are from countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
In sub-Saharan Africa, only nine of the 46 countries are on track to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of a 50% reduction in underweight children less than 5 years old by 2015.
Child malnutrition in India
Food security is not only about the quantity of food produced that people have access to - it is also about the quality and diversity of that food.
In India, farmers are producing enough food to feed the population and yet the prevalence of child malnutrition there is among the highest in the world.
Food production has increased in India, with more than 25% more calories produced per person than in the 1960s, but little attention given to the nutritional quality of the foods being produced and eaten.
Modern Food Systems
Modern agriculture is mainly focused on the cultivation of three crops - rice, maize and wheat - with research and development directed at maximising yields and minimising costs rather than on improving nutrition. This has resulted in diets that are high in energy, but often lacking vital micronutrients essential for health.
Agricultural biodiversity to improve food and nutrition security
Not only are local varieties and species often more nutritious than their modern counterparts, but growing a diverse mix of traditional crops can offer smallholder farmers more resilience against climatic shocks such as drought, or pest and disease outbreaks and help preserve healthy ecosystems.
Local and traditional food, along with neglected and underutilised species, are often overlooked as part of the agricultural mainstream, yet have significant local cultural importance as well as underexploited global potential to improve food and nutrition security.
Bioversity's nutrition programme uses food and nutrition system approaches to promote the use of agricultural biodiversity in agricultural systems to improve human nutrition and health.
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A landscape analysis of nutrition and agriculture - West Africa. R. Fungo, Bioversity International. (1004 KB) | Bioversity International is a member of the CGIAR consortium |
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This work by Bioversity International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
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