The color difference between white and orange sweet potatoes seems superficial — but in Africa, the campaign to consume more beta-carotene-rich orange sweet potatoes is preventing blindness, illness and death to children in Mozambique and Uganda. How does such a simple change have such a big impact?
Biofortification is the process of adding important nutrients to food by breeding better varieties of the staple crops people already eat. While some breeders are genetically modifying crops to make them more nutritious, a group called HarvestPlus came up with a more low-tech solution to the problem of vitamin A deficiency in Africa: they distributed orange sweet potatoes to subsistence farmers that were growing the more common white and yellow varieties.
Orange sweet potatoes have taken off in Mozambique and Uganda, where the campaign was launched, and researchers have found that children now have higher levels of vitamin A. HarvestPlus is expanding its efforts, distributing new varieties of iron-rich beans in Rwanda and a type of orange corn which is high in beta carotene in Zambia. According to NPR: "It's a sign that a new approach to improving nutrition among the world's poor might actually work."
Read more: Saving Lives In Africa With The Humble Sweet Potato at NPR
Related: 15 Suppers with Sweet Potatoes
(Image: Andi Berger/Shutterstock)
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I like this initiative. It's a whole new kind of aid - instead of giving them more money or more food, they're given the opportunity to replace what they can already grow with a more beneficial equivalent. Hopefully the people will accept the new crops, no new agricultural problems arise and godknowswhatsillypoliticking don't get in the way.
What happened to "golden rice" to prevent blindness? Oh yeah, it doesn't exist. Glad someone is being practical about this instead of wasting billions of dollars on genetically modifying food in a failed attempt to increase vitamin content.
Also - yay orange sweet potatoes! Got a bag in my cupboard I need to use up. And since I have glasses/poor eyesight, clearly I need all the beta carotene I can get! Lol.
While a great campaign, I'd heard somewhere (on the radio) that it was catching on slowly. Changing food habits takes time and not everyone wants to shift from their tried and true staples.
They're also trying to supplement lower-nutrient corn with soy beans, for better nutrition and better chances for selling surpluses, and to enrich the soil after years of stripping nutrients from growing corn. But things do catch on slowly, indeed.
The thing about sweet potatoes is that they pretty hardy. I remember stories from WWII survivors in the Philippines saying that it was all they had to eat during the war because they couldn't grow rice.
Anyway, another good thing about it is that you can eat the leaves.