Perennial Staple Crops: Yields, Distribution, and Nutrition in the Global Food System

Biofortification of Staple Food Crops: Six Questions

More than half the world’s population suffers from micronutrient malnutrition. Biofortification of staple food crops is a new public health approach to control vitamin A, iron, and zinc deficiencies in poor countries. Biofortification is the development of micronutrient‐dense staple crops using traditional breeding practices and modern biotechnology. It has multiple advantages: it capitalizes o...

Quantification of ferritin from staple food crops.

Ferritin-iron has been shown to be as bioavailable as ferrous sulfate in humans. Thus, biofortification to breed crops with high ferritin content is a promising strategy to alleviate the global iron deficiency problem. Although ferritin is present in all food crops, its concentration varies between species and varieties. Therefore, a successful ferritin biofortification strategy requires a meth...

Breeding for micronutrients in staple food crops from a human nutrition perspective.

Over three billion people are currently micronutrient (i.e. micronutrient elements and vitamins) malnourished, resulting in egregious societal costs including learning disabilities among children, increased morbidity and mortality rates, lower worker productivity, and high healthcare costs, all factors diminishing human potential, felicity, and national economic development. Nutritional deficie...

Impacts of projected changes and variability in climatic data on major food crops yields in Rwanda

This paper investigated the response of major food crop yields namely beans,cassava, Irish potatoes, maize and sweet potatoes to ongoing changes in climate inRwanda. The projected daily precipitation and temperature data for the period2000-2050 used in this study were generated by stochastic weather generator(LARS-WG) from daily raw data for the period 1961 -2000. These data werecollected from ...

Agronomic Approaches to Increasing Zinc Concentration in Staple Food Crops