Food Secure World Research Articles

A Sustainable Approach to Combat Micronutrient Deficiencies and Ensure Global Food Security through Biofortification

Micronutrient deficiencies, particularly in essential vitamins and minerals, pose a significant public health challenge, affecting over two billion people worldwide. These deficiencies contribute to various health issues, impaired cognitive development, and reduced productivity, ultimately hindering social and economic progress. Biofortification, a process of enhancing the nutritional content of staple crops through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, has emerged as a promising and sustainable approach to combat micronutrient deficiencies and ensure global food security. This review explores the potential of Biofortification as a cost-effective and sustainable solution to address hidden hunger and improve the nutritional status of vulnerable populations. Biofortification offers several advantages over traditional interventions, such as supplementation and food fortification. By targeting staple crops consumed by the majority of the population, Biofortification ensures a wide reach and sustained nutrient intake without requiring significant changes in dietary habits. Moreover, biofortified crops can be grown locally, reducing the reliance on external interventions and empowering farmers to improve their nutritional status and livelihoods. Numerous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of bio fortified crops in increasing micronutrient intake and improving health outcomes. For instance, iron-biofortified pearl millet has been shown to increase iron absorption and reduce anemia prevalence in children, while zinc-biofortified wheat has improved zinc status and reduced stunting. Additionally, vitamin A-biofortified sweet potato and cassava have significantly increased vitamin A intake and reduced vitamin A deficiency in various populations.
 Despite the promising results, the success of Biofortification relies on several factors, including the development of nutrient-dense varieties, consumer acceptance, and effective dissemination strategies. Collaboration among researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders is essential to scale up Biofortification efforts and ensure their long-term sustainability. By prioritizing Biofortification as a key strategy in combating micronutrient deficiencies, we can work towards a more nourished and food-secure world.

Unraveling the role of nanoparticles in improving plant resilience under environmental stress condition

Abstract Background As the world grapples with increasing agricultural demands and unpredictable environmental stressors, there is a pressing need to improve plant resilience. Therefore, understanding the pioneering role of nanoparticles in alleviating plant stress is crucial for developing stress-resilient varieties to enhance food secure world. Nanoparticles have unique physical and chemical properties, and demonstrate their potential to enhance plant growth, nutrient utilization, and stress tolerance. This review delves into the mechanistic insights of nanoparticle-plant interactions, highlighting how these tiny particles can mitigate diverse stressors such as drought, salinity, and heavy metal toxicity. The action of different types of nanoparticles, including metal, carbon-based, and biogenic nanoparticles, are discussed in the context of their interaction with plant physiology and stress responses. Aims This article also explores the potential drawbacks and environmental implications of nanoparticle use, emphasizing the need for responsible and sustainable applications. Therefore, this study aimed to offer exciting possibilities for managing both biotic and abiotic stress in plant species, from improving water-use efficiency and stress resilience via nanotechnology. Conclusions Future research directions are suggested, focusing on nano-bioengineering and precision agriculture to create stress-resilient crops and enhance food security. Through the lens of interdisciplinary research, this paper underscores the significance of nanoparticles as innovative tools in the realm of agriculture, catalyzing a paradigm shift towards sustainable and stress-resilient farming systems.

Corrigendum: mPD-APP: a mobile-enabled plant diseases diagnosis application using convolutional neural network toward the attainment of a food secure world

Corrigendum: mPD-APP: a mobile-enabled plant diseases diagnosis application using convolutional neural network toward the attainment of a food secure world

MPD-APP: a mobile-enabled plant diseases diagnosis application using convolutional neural network toward the attainment of a food secure world.

The devastating effect of plant disease infestation on crop production poses a significant threat to the attainment of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) of food security, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This has been further exacerbated by the lack of effective and accessible plant disease detection technologies. Farmers' inability to quickly and accurately diagnose plant diseases leads to crop destruction and reduced productivity. The diverse range of existing plant diseases further complicates detection for farmers without the right technologies, hindering efforts to combat food insecurity in the region. This study presents a web-based plant diagnosis application, referred to as mobile-enabled Plant Diagnosis-Application (mPD-App). First, a publicly available image dataset, containing a diverse range of plant diseases, was acquired from Kaggle for the purpose of training the detection system. The image dataset was, then, made to undergo the preprocessing stage which included processes such as image-to-array conversion, image reshaping, and data augmentation. The training phase leverages the vast computational ability of the convolutional neural network (CNN) to effectively classify image datasets. The CNN model architecture featured six convolutional layers (including the fully connected layer) with phases, such as normalization layer, rectified linear unit (RELU), max pooling layer, and dropout layer. The training process was carefully managed to prevent underfitting and overfitting of the model, ensuring accurate predictions. The mPD-App demonstrated excellent performance in diagnosing plant diseases, achieving an overall accuracy of 93.91%. The model was able to classify 14 different types of plant diseases with high precision and recall values. The ROC curve showed a promising area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.946, indicating the model's reliability in detecting diseases. The web-based mPD-App offers a valuable tool for farmers and agricultural stakeholders in Sub-Saharan Africa, to detect and diagnose plant diseases effectively and efficiently. To further improve the application's performance, ongoing efforts should focus on expanding the dataset and refining the model's architecture. Agricultural authorities and policymakers should consider promoting and integrating such technologies into existing agricultural extension services to maximize their impact and benefit the farming community.

Assessing ambitious nature conservation strategies in a below 2-degree and food-secure world

Global biodiversity is projected to further decline under a wide range of future socio-economic development pathways, even in sustainability-oriented scenarios. This raises the question how biodiversity can be put on a path to recovery, the core challenge for the implementation of the CBD Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We designed two ambitious global conservation strategies, ‘Half Earth’ (HE) and ‘Sharing the Planet’ (SP), and evaluated their ability to restore terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity and to provide nature's contributions to people (NCP), while also limiting global warming below 2 degrees and ensuring food security. We applied the integrated assessment framework IMAGE with the GLOBIO biodiversity model, using the ‘Middle of the Road’ Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP2) with its projected human population growth as baseline. We found that the HE strategy performs generally better for terrestrial biodiversity (biodiversity intactness (MSA), Area of Habitat, Living Planet Index, Red List Index) in currently still natural regions. The SP strategy yields more improvements for biodiversity in human-used areas, for freshwater biodiversity and for regulating NCP (pest control, pollination, erosion control, water quality). However, both strategies were insufficient to restore biodiversity and corresponded with considerable increases in food security risks and global temperature. Only when we combined the conservation strategies with a portfolio of ‘integrated sustainability measures’, including climate change mitigation and reductions of food waste and animal product consumption, our scenarios resulted in a restoration of biodiversity and NCP while keeping global warming below two degrees and food security risks below the baseline projection.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD SYSTEMS AND FOOD SECURITY IN CONTEXT OF LESSONS LEARNED FROM COVID-19 PANDEMIC AS A GLOBAL CHALLENGE: INSIGHTS FROM A QUALITATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The study aims to help rethink the future of food systems and food security in context of lessons learned from COVID-19 pandemic as global challenge from a qualitative perspective. The pandemic disrupted global food systems that were already at risk to many threats such as climate change, natural resources degradation, extreme weather events, regional conflicts, low productivity, high population growth, and economic slowdown. The paper uses qualitative perspective to analyse COVID-19 effects on food systems and food security, identifies ways to establish resilient and sustainable food systems, and presents a roadmap to achieving a food-secure world by 2030. The findings indicates that the COVID-19 impacted the cash flow at both local and international levels and the financial state of producers, and agri-businesses causing low productivity, limited market accessibility, loss of employment, increased health costs, increased poverty levels, malnutrition, and deaths. Building sustainable and resilient food systems requires; supporting small-medium sized enterprises, strengthening international markets, technological innovations, promoting shorter and more diversified food value chains, and supporting small-scale farmers and rural women is inevitable.

Genetic analysis toward more nutritious barley grains for a food secure world

BackgroundUnderstanding the relationships between nutrition, human health and plant food source is among the highest priorities for public health. Therefore, enhancing the minerals content such as iron (Fe), zinc (Zn) and selenium (Se) in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) grains is an urgent need to improve the nutritive value of barley grains in overcoming malnutrition and its potential consequencing. This study aimed to expedite biofortification of barley grains by elucidating the genetic basis of Zn, Fe, and Se accumulation in the grains, which will contribute to improved barley nutritional quality.ResultsA genome-wide association study (GWAS) was conducted to detect the genetic architecture for grain Zn, Fe, and Se accumulations in 216 spring barley accessions across two years. All the accessions were genotyped by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) molecular markers. Mineral heritability values ranging from moderate to high were revealed in both environments. Remarkably, there was a high natural phenotypic variation for all micronutrient accumulation in the used population. High-LD SNP markers (222 SNPs) were detected to be associated with all micronutrients in barley grains across the two environments plus BLUEs. Three genomic regions were detected based on LD, which were identified for the most effective markers that had associations with more than one trait. The strongest SNP-trait associations were found to be physically located within genes that may be involved in grain Zn and Fe homeostasis. Two putative candidate genes were annotated as Basic helix loop helix (BHLH) family transcription factor and Squamosa promoter binding-like protein, respectively, and have been suggested as candidates for increased grain Zn, Fe, and Se accumulation.ConclusionsThese findings shed a light on the genetic basis of Zn, Fe, and Se accumulation in barley grains and have the potential to assist plant breeders in selecting accessions with high micronutrient concentrations to enhance grain quality and, ultimately human health.

Microbiomes in ruminant protein production and food security.

Abstract The global population is rapidly increasing and will surpass 10 billion people within the next 20 years. As diminishing resources continue to impact agriculture, and with the necessity to feed the world by 2050, the agricultural sector must be able to sustainably and efficiently produce high-quality sources of food that are both attainable to the global population and contribute to healthy, balanced nutrition. Ruminants are a unique contributor towards a sustainable and food secure world, as they are available and utilized across all economic and social demographics, and can produce high-quality protein from otherwise inedible plants from land that is typically unsuitable for crop production or cultivation. Thus, developing tools, methodologies, and systems for optimizing the production of protein from ruminants stands to make great impacts on food security. Breeding and genetics have played a role in this development, but cannot be a singular solution. Microbes are present at abundances that equal or exceed host cell counts, are ubiquitous throughout all mammalian systems and are required for regular host-physiological functions. Optimizing these host-microbe-symbioses in ruminants permits the opportunity to augment the utility and efficiency of microbiomes and their functions to produce production-specific phenotypes and outputs. This review, therefore, examines the role of microbiomes in ruminants to efficiently and sustainably produce high-quality protein for human consumption to aid in efforts to achieve global food security.

Analysis of the gut bacterial communities in beef cattle and their association with feed intake, growth, and efficiency.

The impetus behind the global food security challenge is direct, with the necessity to feed almost 10 billion people by 2050. Developing a food-secure world, where people have access to a safe and sustainable food supply, is the principal goal of this challenge. To achieve this end, beef production enterprises must develop methods to produce more pounds of animal protein with less. Selection for feed-efficient beef cattle using genetic improvement technologies has helped to understand and improve the stayability and longevity of such traits within the herd. Yet genetic contributions to feed efficiency have been difficult to identify, and differing genetics, feed regimens, and environments among studies contribute to great variation and interpretation of results. With increasing evidence that hosts and their microbiomes interact in complex associations and networks, examining the gut microbial population variation in feed efficiency may lead to partially clarifying the considerable variation in the efficiency of feed utilization. The use of metagenomics and high-throughput sequencing has greatly impacted the study of the ruminant gut. The ability to interrogate these systems at great depth has permitted a greater understanding of the microbiological and molecular mechanisms involved in ruminant nutrition and health. Although the microbial communities of the reticulorumen have been well documented to date, our understanding of the populations within the gastrointestinal tract as a whole is limited. The composition and phylogenetic diversity of the gut microbial community are critical to the overall well-being of the host and must be determined to fully understand the relationship between the microbiomes within segments of the cattle gastrointestinal tract and feed efficiency, ADG, and ADFI. This review addresses recent research regarding the bacterial communities along the gastrointestinal tract of beef cattle; their association with ADG, ADFI, and feed efficiency; and the potential implications for beef production.

The many faces of food security

Food insecurity occurs when people do not have secure access to food necessary for a healthy life. The food-insecure are typically the poor, and the traditional focus of food insecurity thinking has been the global poor. Increasingly, it is being recognized that in the rich world, food insecurity manifests itself in calorie-rich but nutrient-poor diets, leading to the linkage between poverty, obesity and its associated health problems. Furthermore, the historical link between income and diets, when projected forwards, shows a growth in demand that would be extremely challenging to meet with sustainable production. This is especially true given that emissions from the food system are significant contributors to climate change, perhaps more so than any other sector; and yet, probably less than half the world's calories are used directly for healthy diets (over half of agricultural production is lost or wasted, fed to animals or consumed in excess of healthy requirements). This review article, of a suite of four books, covers the way the food security argument is framed and how this is changing, food politics and justice and why our food system is as it is. The overall conclusion is that our food system is placing unsustainable demands on the planet, as well as creating injustice and inequity. The 'productivist paradigm' of growing 'ever more, ever more cheaply' while relying on international commodity trade and markets to solve the distributional issues, is unlikely to create a sustainable, just and food-secure world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planting seeds for the future of food.

The health and wellbeing of future generations will depend on humankind's ability to deliver sufficient nutritious food to a world population in excess of 9 billion. Feeding this many people by 2050 will require science-based solutions that address sustainable agricultural productivity and enable healthful dietary patterns in a more globally equitable way. This topic was the focus of a multi-disciplinary international conference hosted by Nestle in June 2015, and provides the inspiration for the present article. The conference brought together a diverse range of expertise and organisations from the developing and industrialised world, all with a common interest in safeguarding the future of food. This article provides a snapshot of three of the recurring topics that were discussed during this conference: soil health, plant science and the future of farming practice. Crop plants and their cultivation are the fundamental building blocks for a food secure world. Whether these are grown for food or feed for livestock, they are the foundation of food and nutrient security. Many of the challenges for the future of food will be faced where the crops are grown: on the farm. Farmers need to plant the right crops and create the right conditions to maximise productivity (yield) and quality (e.g. nutritional content), whilst maintaining the environment, and earning a living. New advances in science and technology can provide the tools and know-how that will, together with a more entrepreneurial approach, help farmers to meet the inexorable demand for the sustainable production of nutritious foods for future generations.

Healthy soils: a prerequisite for sustainable food security

Soil health constitutes the foundation for the production of healthy food and thus contributes to local and global food security. Recent findings indicate that there will need to be a 60 % increase in global food production and associated ecosystem services by 2050. However, one-third of global soils are currently facing moderate to severe degradation through soil erosion, nutrient depletion, salinity, sealing and contamination. Evidence-based decisions and soil information are crucial for achieving sustainable soil management at all levels. In 2012, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations established the Global Soil Partnership to highlight effective and concerted actions against soil degradation and to advocate healthy soils for a food secure world.

Planting seeds for the future of food

The health and wellbeing of future generations will depend on humankind's ability to deliver sufficient nutritious food to a world population in excess of 9 billion. Feeding this many people by 2050 will require science‐based solutions that address sustainable agricultural productivity and enable healthful dietary patterns in a more globally equitable way. This topic was the focus of a multi‐disciplinary international conference hosted by Nestlé in June 2015, and provides the inspiration for the present article. The conference brought together a diverse range of expertise and organisations from the developing and industrialised world, all with a common interest in safeguarding the future of food. This article provides a snapshot of three of the recurring topics that were discussed during this conference: soil health, plant science and the future of farming practice. Crop plants and their cultivation are the fundamental building blocks for a food secure world. Whether these are grown for food or feed for livestock, they are the foundation of food and nutrient security. Many of the challenges for the future of food will be faced where the crops are grown: on the farm. Farmers need to plant the right crops and create the right conditions to maximise productivity (yield) and quality (e.g. nutritional content), whilst maintaining the environment, and earning a living. New advances in science and technology can provide the tools and know‐how that will, together with a more entrepreneurial approach, help farmers to meet the inexorable demand for the sustainable production of nutritious foods for future generations. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Crops that feed the world 3. Investing in lentil improvement toward a food secure world

Lentils play a major role in the food and nutritional security of millions, particularly among low-income Asian families, because of the high protein content of their seed. As is the case for many pulses, lentils play an important role as a rotation crop, enhancing soil fertility and providing other environmental services in production systems. While its production has risen globally at 8.6 kg/ha/year from 1961 to 2008, the major challenge is to increase investment in lentil improvement (both research and outreach) in countries where the crop is part of the production system. Where currently grown the major abiotic stresses are low moisture availability and high temperatures in spring, and winter cold at high elevations. Among biotic stresses, rust, and vascular wilt are key, and resistance has resulted in improvements in performance. Additional production constraints include the agronomic problems of pod loss, lodging and poor crop management. Adequate variability for most genetic constraints exists within the gene pool allowing breeding. However, several key traits, such as biomass yield, pod shed, nitrogen fixation and resistance to aphids are not currently addressable by breeding because of insufficient variation. Among lentil-producing developing countries, policies have not yet focused on lentil development needs to enhance food security and provide a remunerative rotation crop for cereals. Looking towards a future in which there is likely to be less water available to agriculture, climate change, food insecurity, rising costs for inorganic nitrogen fertilizer, and an increasingly nutrition-conscious society—collectively these give a bright future for a highly nutritious food produced by a nitrogen-fixing crop such as lentil adapted to the farming systems of marginal lands.

Assuring A Food-Secure World in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities

ABSTRACT Prospects for a food-secure world will remain bleak if the global community continues with business as usual. However, with foresight and decisive action to improve both availability of food and access to food, global food security can be assured. IFPRI's 2020 Vision initiative has identified six priority areas of action: (i) strengthen the capacity of developing-country governments; (ii) invest in the productivity of low-income people; (iii) strengthen agricultural research and extension systems; (iv) promote sustainable agricultural intensification with sound management of natural resources; (v) develop efficient, effective and low-cost agricultural markets; and (vi) expand international cooperation and assistance, and improve its efficiency and effectiveness.

World food security: prospects and trends

A food-secure world produces enough food for its population and provides access to food for all its people. It must therefore ensure not only a balance between food availability and requirements, but also an end to famine, little seasonal or chronic undernutrition, and virtually no micronutrient deficiencies and nutrient-depleting illness. In 1990, we estimate that 15–35 million people were at risk of famine, 786 million were vulnerable to chronic undernutrition, and hundreds of millions suffered from micronutrient deficiencies, diarrhoea, measles, malaria, parasites, and other nutritional impairments. A normative scenario to achieve food security in the warmer, more crowded, more connected, but more diverse world of 2060 requires widespread acknowledgement of food as a human right, large increases in food production and income, a pervasive global safety net, and the capacity to cope with surprise. Some elements of these requirements are already in place. This normative scenario results in fewer than 100 million hungry people compared with other ‘business as usual’ scenarios that project a hungry population of 641 million in 2060 under current climate and 629–2087 million with climate change. Speculative and clearly optimistic, our normative scenario offers multiple pathways for achieving a food-secure world.