Globally, we are producing more food than the population needs, writes Professor Liselotte Schafer-Elinder. Subsidising overproduction in developed nations is leading to excessive consumption and obesity. It is also undermining agriculture in the developing world, hindering the eradication of hunger and poverty.

The dairy sector in the European Union is an example of how agriculture subsidies can lead to negative health effects in Europe as well as in developing countries.

Surplus milk is converted to storable products and export subsidies are granted in order to dispose of it. These undermine the milk sector in many developing countries, which has an important role in alleviating poverty and malnutrition. Surplus butter is then sold with subsidies to the food industry, which turns it into energy dense foods such as ice cream and cakes, fuelling the obesity epidemic in many developed nations.

The World Health Organisation has noted this problem. Its global strategy on diet, physical activity, and health advises member states "to take healthy nutrition into account in their agricultural policies."

As long as the supply of energy dense foods is not reduced, the prevalence of obesity and social inequalities in health is likely to continue to increase, warns the author. As a first step to reverse this trend, agricultural market support promoting the overproduction of food has to be phased out.

But even if subsidies are phased out, global supplies will probably continue to be higher than "healthy" demand for many years to come, she adds. Therefore, as a second step, internationally binding conventions like the one on tobacco are needed.

These should include issues such as marketing of energy dense foods, availability to children, labelling, and tax and price measures.

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The biofortified rice was developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. One of its major sponsors is HarvestPlus, an international, interdisciplinary research program that collaborates with Cornell and other universities and agencies to reduce micronutrient malnutrition by breeding nutrient-dense staple foods. One of the first crops to be biofortified under this initiative is rice, which is a staple food of some 3 billion people, many of them among the world's poorest.

Now that researchers know that the biofortified rice can actually improve the nutritional status of people who eat it under controlled experimental conditions, follow-up studies will not only seek to confirm these findings but also will look at how well the rice is accepted by the general population, Haas said.

Although researchers at Cornell were not involved in the development of the biofortified rice, they are actively involved in developing disease-, drought- and pest-resistant as well as higher yield rice varieties through genetic engineering.

Co-authors of the study include John L. Beard and Laura Murray-Kolb of Pennsylvania State University; Angelina Felix and the late Angelita del Mundo, University of the Philippines/Los Banos; and Glenn Gregorio, IRRI. The study was supported by the Canadian Micronutrient Initiative, Asian Development Bank, the Danish (DANIDA) Trust Fund and the International Food Policy Research Institute. It was presented last year at the Experimental Biology conference in San Diego, the American Society of Agronomy conference in Seattle and the World Rice Research Conference in Japan.

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