The World Health Organisation (WHO) has launched its Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), an initiative to bring the benefits of fortified foods to the developing world which it says will end micronutrient deficiency for the poor and save millions of lives.
GAIN will assist recipient countries in putting iron, iodine, vitamin A, folic acid and other vitamins and minerals into everyday foods like salt, flour, oil, sugar and soy sauce, depending on each nation's food habits.
"Vitamins and minerals provide one important key to poverty reduction and economic improvement in the developing world," said Jay Naidoo, chairperson of the Development Bank of South Africa and chairperson of GAIN, a coalition of public and private sector organisations.
He added that micronutrient deficiency has many invisible economic effects that are widely underestimated - it reduces the energy of working-age people and hurts the learning ability of children, causing billions of dollars in lost productivity in developing countries, who can least afford it, claims Naidoo.
China, Morocco, South Africa and Vietnam will be the first four countries to receive the GAIN fortification grants. Other countries are expected to be added by the end of the year, said the GAIN organisers at the World Economic Forum's Africa Economic Summit in Durban, South Africa.
"No other technology offers as big a way to improve life for the world's poorest at such low costs or in so short a time," said Rolf Carriere, GAIN's executive director. "Our alliance can jump-start the process by helping countries initiate large-scale food fortification in just one year, rather than the 10 years or more that conventional assistance programmes often take to put into action."
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started GAIN with a $50 million grant, followed by contributions from the Canadian, US and Dutch governments, with the World Bank serving as the trustee.
Research has demonstrated that foetal deaths, blindness, anaemia, mental retardation and many common infections that kill the young and the weak are prevalent in the developing world simply because individuals lack adequate essential vitamins and minerals in their diets. One of the most successful programmes has been the addition of iodine to salt to prevent mental retardation and IQ loss. Some 70 per cent of all salt now consumed worldwide is iodised, according to the WHO.
Carriere claims that in five to six years time, "children will not be going blind anymore in recipient countries that fortify foods with vitamin A".
The WHO highlighted vitamin A deficiency as the leading cause of preventable blindness in children. Between 100 and 140 million children are vitamin A deficient, but providing adequate vitamin A in areas of deficiency can improve a child's chances of survival by as much as 25 per cent, it claims.
Each of the first four selected countries presented detailed proposals to GAIN at the summit yesterday, including South Africa's proposal for a three-year $2.8 million grant for delivering fortified maize and wheat flour to 45 million South African consumers in the next 6-18 months.
A five-year programme in China will see soy sauce fortified with iron, which would reach 360 million people and fortified flour in the Western Region of the country, which will reach 49 million people.
GAIN is also giving a $2.8 million grant to fortify wheat flour, edible oil and milk to reach some 23 million low-income consumers in Morocco within 18 months and a grant for iron fortified fish sauce in Vietnam.