Devex Dish: The roots of India’s anemia crisis may lie in its crops

An interlocking mix of poverty, genetically modified foods, and climate change is driving an anemia crisis in India, particularly among women. And it’s unclear how the country will meet the emergency.

The problem begins with 1 billion people, or roughly 74% of India’s population, being unable to afford healthy diets. Genetically modified crops seem to offer a solution since they’re easier to grow than native plants and produce higher yields. They are so promising, in fact, that a scheme from the Indian government to feed more than 810 million people depends on distributing them, as Devex contributor Sanket Jain reports.

These crops require more chemical fertilizers and pesticides than native plants do. But those substances impact the soil and its nutrients, reducing the essential nutrients that ultimately end up in the crops, including iron. Climate change can make it even more difficult to grow these crops, leading farmers to layer on even more fertilizers and pesticides, thereby further reducing their ultimate nutritional value.

Because of the Indian government’s scheme, many thousands of people rely on these genetically modified crops as their main source of nutrients. The result is a mounting anemia crisis attributed primarily to iron deficiency. Nearly 30% of women worldwide between 15 and 49 years old — or more than half a billion women in total — are now anemic, according to the World Health Organization. Climate change is also driving up malaria cases, which is another key cause of anemia.

The condition is particularly dangerous in women of childbearing age, as it may cause them to lose a pregnancy or they may pass the condition on to their children, leading to lifelong disabilities.

The Indian government has another scheme to try to counter these astronomical rates: dispatching health workers to identify vulnerable groups and providing iron and folic acid tablets to pregnant women once they reach the second trimester. But experts say they might also need to reconsider what people are eating.

As community health worker Kamal Kore put it: “The majority of answers to our health problems lie in the food plate.”

Read: Climate crisis and food insecurity are driving anemia in India

On the brink

The U.S. government predicts that international experts will declare an “ongoing famine” in Gaza early May, according to an internal memo seen by Colum Lynch, Devex’s U.N. correspondent. The memo, prepared on behalf of Secretary of State Antony Blinken by U.S. experts on food security in the Department of State and USAID, has the alarming subject line: “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths.”

The memo, which was prepared in early April, establishes that Israel is now imposing administrative challenges that are blocking the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. More than 2 million people in the territory need food, and the assessment concludes that even unimpeded food delivery may no longer stave off deaths from starvation.

A separate confidential paper from USAID officials, which Colum also obtained, concludes that Israel has violated a U.S. directive that requires recipients of American military assistance to permit the unimpeded delivery of U.S.-funded humanitarian support.

The memo concludes that the “deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history.” That conclusion echoes warnings from a World Food Programme official last week that the situation in Gaza could descend into a famine in a matter of weeks.

“We need to scale up massively our assistance,” Gian Caro Cirris, Geneva director of WFP, warned. “But under the current conditions, I’m afraid the situation will further deteriorate.”

Exclusive: USAID officials say Israel breached US directive on Gaza aid

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Life-threatening delays

Gaza isn’t the only place where famine now seems all but inevitable.

The coordinator of the INGO Forum for Sudan, Anthony Neal, says aid workers are no longer talking about how to prevent famine there, but how “to deal with the famine that we will have.” He warns that more than 2 million people could die in the next six to 12 months.

This follows more than a year of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The situation is now exacerbated by the monthslong delays in processing visa requests for aid workers, as my colleague Rob Merrick reports. And permission to travel across the Darfur region, which is on the brink of being overrun by the RSF, has routinely been denied.

In addition to the processing delays, aid workers are only getting visas that last a few months and are good for a single entry, meaning they must reapply each time they leave the country.

Read: Sudan visa curbs fuel risk that ‘millions will die,’ aid groups warn

Searching for solutions

It is no surprise, then, that those conflicts, as well as insecurity in Haiti and elsewhere, have driven up global hunger numbers. A combined 280 million people in 59 countries and territories faced high levels of acute hunger last year, according to the latest Global Report on Food Crises, which came out last week.

But while the focus in the short term is obviously on ending those conflicts and providing sufficient humanitarian aid, the Food and Agriculture Organization has some suggestions for long-term recovery:

• The first step, according to the agency, is to strike a better balance between traditional humanitarian assistance and funding for agricultural support, particularly because agricultural support can also serve as preemptive aid, by helping address some of the drivers of food insecurity.

• Second, FAO calls for specifically targeting the agricultural sectors during crises, to help bring down emergency needs.

• And finally, there must be a renewed focus on addressing the causes of food crises.

Read: Global hunger levels ‘bleak’ amid spikes due to wars in Gaza and Sudan

The food-climate nexus

To put a dent in hunger and malnutrition worldwide, climate change needs to be part of the equation. That was the overarching message of a panel on climate-smart agriculture at last week’s Society for International Development’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.

“Globally, agriculture and agri-food systems employ a billion people, making these billion people incredibly vulnerable to climate shocks. But these same systems actually contribute 30% of all global greenhouse emissions,” said Nancy Eslick, senior deputy assistant to the administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security.

“There's hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers and families that are producing up to 80% of the food for themselves, their communities, and those in the global south. These are the people that are contributing least to the climate problem, but yet, they're impacted most by the changes that we're seeing,” she added.

Eslick, who also serves as USAID’s global water coordinator, said that “in order to solve the climate crisis, we have to integrate adaptation and mitigation across all USAID sectors, whether that’s water, health, nutrition, agriculture, and look at an integrated approach.”

Alexander Lotsch, senior climate change specialist in the agriculture and food global practice at the World Bank, pointed out that an integrated approach means looking at the overall food system and the entire value chain, “including all the inputs, the land, the energy, the fertilizers … but also very importantly, post-production sources of emissions.” That means also taking a hard look at consumers and their eating habits.

And any comprehensive response needs to be global: “Every country needs to take on this transformation — high-income countries, middle-income countries, low-income countries,” Lotsch said.

Chew on this

A court in the Philippines revoked the permit to grow “golden rice” genetically modified to boost vitamin A, but the government is expected to appeal the decision. [New Scientist]

Solar energy companies are taking over farmland in the American Midwest, drawn by the cheap rents and the wide-open fields. But they may be irrevocably damaging the soil as they install solar energy panels and also harming neighboring cropland. [Reuters]

As bird flu spreads in dairy cows in the U.S., Colombia becomes the first country to restrict imports of American beef and beef products. [Reuters]

Farmers and scientists are increasingly looking at crop wild relatives — the wild cousins of domesticated crops — for genetic traits that can be reclaimed to improve drought, heat, and disease resistance. [Civil Eats]

Anna Gawel contributed to this edition of Devex Dish.