Photo Gallery The World's Hidden Famine
An schoolgirl feeds her younger sister during their mid-day meal at a government primary school in the outskirts of Hyderabad, India. In India, about 250 million people, or a fifth of the population, are undernourished. Researchers hope that new kinds of enriched crops will help improve the crisis.
Indian activist Vandana Shiva before a press conference in 2007. "A globally operating industry is pushing hard to make the world dependent on their products," she says. She argues that the pearl millet project, for example, is too focused on one single nutrient. "But a single nutrient is not a solution to multidimensional malnutrition crisis; the body needs all the micronutrients."
Almost a third of humanity suffers from an affliction known as hidden famine, a deficiency in vitamins and trace elements like zinc, iron and iodine. Here, the figures for iron-deficiency anemia.
The world has enough to eat. The only problem is that the poor, whose diet consists primarily of grain, are eating the wrong food.
Corn, wheat and rice the grain varieties that dominate factory farming -- are bred primarily for yield and not for their nutritional content.
In the laboratories of his M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai, scientists are experimenting with high zinc-content rice. The biologists analyzed thousands of rice strains and eventually discovered about a dozen varieties with especially high zinc levels.
