A global team led by University of Nottingham researchers, as well as academics and researchers from Addis Ababa University (AAU) in Ethiopia and Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) in Malawi, working on the GeoNutrition project, have uncovered some findings on the relationship between crops, soils, and micronutrient deficiencies among the people living there, emphasizing the importance of ecology in the nutritional content of crops. Their findings, which were funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, were published in the journal Nature.
 
The team analyzed the grain of more than 3,000 cereal crop samples from farmer’s fields in Ethiopia and Malawi, and found that the content of calcium, iron, selenium, and zinc in the cereal grain varied substantially with location, with some areas showing much lower levels of micronutrients than others. Some cereal types, such as millets, are more nutritious than others, such as maize. However, whether deficiencies are likely in an area depends on its soils and landscapes.
 
Globally, micronutrient deficiencies effect more than half of children younger than age 5, especially in areas where access to nutritious food is limited due to socioeconomic reasons. The present study shows that location is intrinsically linked to the nutritional quality of diets – getting enough nutrients could be described as a ‘postcode lottery’ due to the location-based nutritional variances. In some communities, location appears to be the largest influencing factor in determining the dietary intake of micronutrients.
 
“It is important to have good quality evidence on the nutritional quality of diets if we are going to support public health and agriculture policies to improve people’s health and wellbeing. Mapping the quality of diets is an important part of this evidence,” Martin Broadley, professor of Plant Nutrition in the School of Biosciences and a contributor to the Future Food Beacon, said.
 
“Nutritional surveillance work on the quality of staple cereals is an important part of wider public health policies to address micronutrient deficiencies and we hope that this type of work is now adopted in more countries,” Dr. Dawd Gashu of AAU said.
 
“By learning more about how the nutritional quality of cereal grains is linked to soil types and landscapes, as we have in this study, we are now better able to advise farmers how to choose and cultivate more nutritious crops,” Dr. Patson Nalivata of LUANAR said.