Biofortification boosts potential to combat anemia

The daily diets of more than two billion people globally lack enough essential vitamins and minerals. This reality leads to ill health and lost productivity that cost the global economy an estimated USD 3.5 trillion annually. Iron deficiency is one of the most pernicious forms of undernutrition and the leading cause of anemia, which can impair children’s physical and cognitive development and increase the risk of maternal and child mortality.

Over the last two decades, CGIAR has invested in biofortification—the process of breeding that increases vitamin and nutrient content in food crops. It is considered a sustainable and cost-effective way to boost both nutrition security and farmer livelihoods, especially in areas where most families lack access to diverse diets, supplements or fortified foods. Peer-reviewed clinical trials have demonstrated that biofortified crops can improve nutritional status and health, and recent research in the Peruvian Andes published in the Journal of Nutrition in 2020 indicate that iron-biofortified potatoes could be especially effective at preventing anemia.

In what was the first human study of iron absorption in potato, iron-deficient women of reproductive age in Peru’s Huancavelica region ate 500 grams of potato a day for two weeks. Whereas people absorb 2-10% of the iron available in most vegetables, pulses and other crops, researchers found – via red blood cell analysis – that these women absorbed as much as 29% of the iron in the potatoes they consumed.

Accessible iron

Gabriela Burgos, a nutritionist at the International Potato Center (CIP), and one of the study’s authors, explains the importance of these findings: “We now know that potato, even though it has much less iron than beans or spinach, has great potential for reducing iron-deficiency because a higher proportion of the potato’s iron is absorbed by the human body.” Through biofortification, CIP breeders have enhanced potatoes’ iron content with up to 50% more iron than conventional varieties. Those potatoes are the products of a 17-year process that began with identifying and crossing of high-iron Andean cultivars, which were later crossed with advanced breeding parents to produced high-yielding, disease-resistant, iron-biofortified potatoes.