Countries around the world continue to grapple with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems and nutrition security. HarvestPlus and its partners innovated to ensure that smallholder farming households and low-income consumers can continue to receive nutrition, health, and livelihood benefits of biofortified crops.
We have adapted and innovated our support and facilitation practices so that our beneficiaries remain able to plant, cultivate, and harvest their crops, and sell surplus crop as needed. We are also actively engaging public and private partners to enact supportive measures.
One key takeaway from the pandemic is the advantage of localized food systems, which are less prone to supply and transportation disruptions that put farmers at risk; this validates our delivery model of catalyzing biofortified food systems that are in proximity to smallholder farmers and meet their farming and marketing needs.
The impact of COVID-19 also has forced more vulnerable households to rely on relativley lower-cost but less nutritious staples for the bulk of thier diets. Biofortification is a way to deliver nutrition and health through staples at no additional cost to farming families or governments.