GAIN seeks to understand and tackle barriers faced by small enterprises working to boost availability, affordability, desirability, and convenience of nutritious foods like milk, especially for people on low-incomes and population sub-groups who stand to benefit from greater consumption of nutrient-dense foods, such as children.
A fortified future
EP 02
Food systems are under increasing pressure. In this podcast, we discuss the innovations necessary…
The Second Global Summit on Food Fortification Virtual Series will kick off today November 6th with a high-level launch event as part of the Micronutrient Forum Global Conference CONNECTED. This year’s Summit will gather thousands of experts on food fortification, staple crop biofortification, food systems, and nutrition. Due to COVID-19 the Summit will go fully digital.
On the recent World Food Day, the clarion call was clearer than ever: We must fix our food systems to improve human health, drive economic growth, and save the planet from environmental collapse. The challenges facing us are wide-ranging. The way the world produces and consumes food causes huge environmental impacts, and yet 3 billion people worldwide are unable to afford a healthy diet, and up to a third of the food we produce is wasted.
The Government of People’s Republic of Bangladesh has just given the green light to the new Iodised Salt Act 2020 act aimed at improving the monitoring and efficacy of the country’s salt iodisation programme. The new Act will increase and incentivise compliance, as well as strengthen the ability of the regulatory authorities to enforce salt iodisation.
At every life stage, micronutrients are crucial to immune system function and resilience to infectious disease. This brief makes the case for large scale staple food fortification as a critically important tool to fight malnutrition in general, and even more so during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
As the COVID-19 pandemic shifts into its second phase, food fortification has never been so necessary in the fight against malnutrition, according to a call to action endorsed by Food Fortification Initiative, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Helen Keller International, Iodine Global Network, Nutrition International, the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, UNICEF and the World Food Programme.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our economies, health and food systems and threatens to deepen the global crisis of malnutrition. Food fortification strategies are an essential part of the nutrition safety net during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond – helping to restore access to healthy diet when the availability of fresh produce and animal-source foods is limited.
Lack of diversity in many people’s diets means that more than two billion people globally are deficient in at least one micronutrient, which has a transversal impact on individuals, communities, and nations. It is within this context that GAIN’s Large Scale Food Fortification (LSFF) portfolio of projects, which operate both at national and global levels, has been deployed, with the aim of increasing micronutrient intakes through the addition of bioavailable micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) to commonly consumed foods.
This study responds to earlier findings of suboptimal compliance with mandatory fortification of edible oil in Bangladesh. We aim to explain the root causes of poor compliance and to provide recommendations to strengthen the national fortification programme in Bangladesh and other similar contexts.