• Prime Minister Narendra Modi released 109 high-yielding, climate-resilient and biofortified seed varieties of agricultural and horticultural crops, aiming to enhance farm productivity and farmers' income.

• Developed by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), these varieties span 61 crops, including 34 field crops and 27 horticultural crops.

• The field crop varieties include cereals, millets, forage crops, oilseeds, pulses, sugarcane, cotton, and fibre crops.

• For horticulture, the PM released new varieties of fruits, vegetables, plantation crops, tubers, spices, flowers, and medicinal plants.

• PM Modi unveiled the seeds at three experimental agriculture plots at Delhi’s Pusa Campus.

What is biofortification?

• Fortification is the practice of deliberately increasing the content of one or more micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) in a food or condiment to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply and provide a public health benefit with minimal risk to health. As well as increasing the nutritional content of staple foods, the addition of micronutrients can help to restore the micronutrient content lost during processing.

• Biofortification is the process by which the nutritional quality of food crops is improved through agronomic practices, conventional plant breeding, or modern biotechnology. 

• Biofortification differs from conventional fortification. Biofortification aims to increase nutrient levels in crops during plant growth rather than through manual means during processing of the crops. 

• Biofortification may therefore present a way to reach populations where supplementation and conventional fortification activities may be difficult to implement or limited.

Significance of biofortification

• Malnutrition is caused by consumption of an unbalanced diet. It affects most of the world’s population at some point in their lifecycle during infancy to old age. 

• Malnutrition affects growth and development, and reduces the work efficiency in humans, besides having huge economic and societal implications. 

• Biofortification, the process of breeding nutrients into food crops, provides a comparatively cost-effective, sustainable, and long-term means of delivering more micronutrients. 

• This approach not only will lower the number of severely malnourished people who require treatment by complementary interventions, but also will help them maintain improved nutritional status. 

• Moreover, biofortification provides a feasible means of reaching malnourished rural populations who may have limited access to commercially marketed fortified foods and supplements.

• Climate change is reducing the nutritional quality of food and biofortification has the potential to address this challenge. 

Merits of biofortification:

• It is regarded as the most sustainable approach to alleviate malnutrition.

• It provides nutrients in natural form, thus nutrients enter the body as part of natural food matrix.

• People can afford the ‘biofortified food’ as it does not involve any additional price.

• ‘Biofortified varieties’ are as high yielding as ‘traditional varieties’, thus no loss is incurred to the farmers.

• It does not require elaborate infrastructure facility as required in ‘food fortification’.

• It does not need elaborate distribution system as required in ‘medical supplementation’.

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