Sight and Life Magazine 1/2011

66 THE FIRST GLOBAL CONFERENCE ON BIOFORTIFICATIONInstitute, Iain MacGillivray of the Canadian International DevelopmentAgency, and Ruth Oniang’o of the African Journal of Food,Agriculture, Nutrition, and Development discussed his findingsand took questions from the audience.Keith West of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of PublicHealth presented the second commissioned paper, Biofortificationas a complementary approach to controlling micronutrientdeficiencies in the developing world. This discussed how biofortificationfits into already existing nutritional strategies of dietarydiversification, food fortification, and supplementation.Panelists included Shawn Baker of Helen Keller International,Mahabub Hossain of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee,MG Venkatesh Mannar of Micronutrient Initiative, andMeera Shekar of the World Bank.On the final day, Dr Bouis summarized the conference keynotes,panel discussions, and symposia, looking back at theframework proposed on day one (Figure 1). A panel discussionfollowed, including Pamela Anderson of the InternationalPotato Center, Arun Joshi of the International Wheat and MaizeImprovement Center, Denis Kyetere of the National AgricultureResearch Organisation – Uganda, and Francisco Reifschneider ofEmbrapa (Brazil). Panelists discussed ideas for moving biofortificationforward. The conference concluded with a strong callto action by moderator Roger Thurow of the Chicago Council onGlobal Affairs.table 1: The afternoon symposia presented findings on:> Progress, challenges, and the way forward in nutrition researchon biofortified crops: vitamin A> Progress, challenges, and the way forward in nutrition researchon biofortified crops: iron and zinc> Progress, challenges, and the way forward in breeding and genedevelopment for vitamin A: taking stock, gaps, and solutions> Progress, challenges, and the way forward in breeding and genedevelopment for iron and zinc: taking stock, gaps, and solutions> Delivering vitamin A crops: a visible nutrient> Delivering iron and zinc crops: an invisible nutrient> Biofortification for the developed world: progress withantioxidants and other nutrients> Biofortification through agronomic practices> Breeding for bioavailability> Building public trust in transgenic biofortified crops: a dialogue> Climate change and the nutritional quality of foods> Orange-fleshed sweet potato is making a difference> Weaving biofortification into the global development agenda> What about protein?Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof during his keynoteaddress on the second day of the First Global Conference onBiofortification, Washington DC, USA.The afternoon symposia (Table 1), featuring the work of 50scientists and researchers, focused on the technical aspects ofbreeding, nutrition, and delivery of biofortified crops. It also focusedon biofortification through agronomic practices, buildingtrust around transgenic biofortified crops, and climate change’srole in diminishing the nutritional quality of foods.Highlights included a session on a recent project that disseminatedorange-fleshed sweet potato to 24,000 householdsin Uganda and Mozambique. By researchers from HarvestPlusand the International Food Policy Research Institute, this alsopresented strategies used by the project to promote new sweetpotato varieties.All videos, presentations, and papers from the conferencecan be downloaded at: http://biofortconf.ifpri.info.http://www.flickr.com/photos/48533839@N05/sets/Correspondence: Hannah Guedenet, HarvestPlus, c/o IFPRI,2033 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006-1002, USAE-mail: HarvestPlus@cgiar.org